Trevor Loudon | The Epoch Times* | October 30, 2019, Updated: November 6, 2019
Commentary
I heard a love story recently that brought me to tears. It wasn’t a Shakespearean tragedy of star-crossed lovers. It wasn’t romantic at all. It wasn’t a tale of a mother’s self-sacrifice for her children—quite the opposite.
It was a simple tale of masculine love—something so rarely praised and so often devalued that Western culture is dying for the very lack of it.
A highly regarded U.S. military leader, a veteran of one of this country’s toughest military units, told me his story.
Many years ago, my friend’s son was about 16. He was smoking marijuana every day, and no matter what his parents told him, or how much they pleaded or tried to reason with him, he simply wouldn’t quit. The son’s drug habit became a big family issue.
The boy’s mother offered him unconditional love. She would be there for him, no matter how he behaved. When the boy’s father threatened to throw his son out of the house, his distraught mother would tearfully plead his case. Her love for her son was overwhelming and unquestionable—and completely ineffective.
Eventually, the father, a man who had led some of the world’s toughest troops into combat, made one of the bravest decisions of his life. He put his son in the back of the family car. He drove him down to the local shopping mall and made him get out. He told his son: “This is your new home. … You stay here until you learn to love this family more than you love marijuana.”
The father drove away, choking back tears and praying all the way home.
Five long, tearful, and fearful days later, the boy turned up on the family doorstep and said: “I’m never smoking that stuff again. Can I please come home?”
The boy was joyfully welcomed back to the family—and he kept his word.
The big lie of modern Western society is that masculinity is dangerous, destructive, even toxic. Masculinity is harsh and unforgiving. It’s warlike, aggressive, and intolerant. It needs to be suppressed. We need more love, and that’s essentially a feminine virtue. Feminine love (the only “real” love, we are led to believe) is kind and forgiving, accepting and tolerant, welcoming and unconditional.
The truth, known to virtually every civilization in world history but somehow largely forgotten in our own, is that there are two sides to love: the masculine and the feminine. Both are essential to any healthy family, church, or society. And in proper balance, they produce results far greater than the sum of the parts.
No family can truly prosper without feminine love. How sad it must be for some to grow up without memories of a mother’s unconditional love: having your grazed knee bandaged, eating a hot meal with mom on a cold rainy day, and snuggling on her lap while she reads you a story. Or seeing her beam with pride when you graduate high school, or watching the tears roll down her face when you ship out to a combat zone.
But what of the love of the father? Can any family reach its true potential without masculine love? This is the love that demands respect, that will lay down conditions. This is the dad who will kick your backside if you disrespect your mother. The father who will make you clean up your room, or who will bawl you out for a bad report card.
This is also the father who will teach his son to stand up for himself and will expect him to strive for goals. He’ll demand that the boy shows courtesy to his elders and be willing to protect his younger siblings and those weaker than himself.
This is the father who will be a rock for his daughter, protecting her from every threat and danger, especially from boys like he used to be. He will encourage her to be the best she can be in every aspect of life. He will teach her to respect herself and look for a husband who is at least as good as her dad.
How many millions of young Western men—most other cultures haven’t gotten as crazy as us yet—are rotting in jails, working endless dead-end jobs, smoking dope all day long on welfare, or living in mom’s basement at 35 because they never had a dad around to take them fishing or boot their backsides when needed?
How many millions of young women move from one hopeless relationship to another because they so lack self-respect they’ll latch on to any man who’ll have them? How many of them struggle to develop real meaningful relationships because they have no yardstick to recognize a good man, even if they happen to stumble across one? How many millions of their children are almost certain to repeat the same cycle?
Masculine love isn’t just desirable; it’s essential for our survival. A lack of the masculine qualities of leadership, decisiveness, discipline, and courage are destroying the Western family, churches, and culture.
Masculine Christianity
Christianity, the bedrock of Western culture, was once a very masculine religion. Jesus came with a sword, not a poem. He overturned the moneychangers’ tables in the Temple and didn’t attempt to mediate a peaceful resolution.
He said, “Go forth and sin no more,” not, “Don’t worry, do what you feel like, I’ll make it right with dad.”
Modern Western Christianity is drowning in feminine love. Seldom will you hear an American or European priest or pastor ever get tough with his flock. You’ll hear very little about renouncing sin or denouncing evil in most Western churches.
Your modern Western church experience probably won’t include a military veteran priest or pastor who can preach a sermon that will chill your blood and cleanse your soul. You will likely not sing songs of praise such as “Onward Christian Soldiers.”
A caricature of today’s clergy would be a wispy-bearded, latte-drinking pastor, wearing skinny jeans and playing sappy “Christian” rock music, while he (or she) tells you that Jesus loves you no matter what you do, and as long as you put some money in the collection plate, you’re good with God—whoever she may be.
Western Christianity has all but abandoned masculine love, and our churches, families, and culture are dying because of it.
The fact that many people will be enraged by what I have just written only proves my point. We have so lost our bearings in the West that stating obvious truths about the virtues of masculinity and its role in family, church, and societal leadership could be enough to get you fired, banished, murdered, or even de-friended on Facebook.
To recover our culture, we must restore our respect for masculinity and the masculine virtues. We must recognize that masculine love is what drives young men to defy tyrants, fight just wars, explore space, create businesses, plant churches, and build strong families.
Life without feminine love is sterile, suppressive, harsh, and cold. Communist China, which so undervalues femininity that it has aborted tens of millions of baby girls under the “one-child policy,” is a case in point. Life without masculine love is, to borrow from Hobbes, “poor, nasty, brutal, and short.” Go to any inner-city welfare slum, where fatherless families are the norm, to see proof of that.
Any family, church, or society that can properly honor and balance both feminine and masculine love is destined to grow and prosper. We need both aspects of love to make us whole—and holy.
*Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Photo credit: A father and son watch batting practice prior to a game between the Colorado Rockies and Arizona Diamondbacks at Chase Field in Phoenix, Ariz., on Aug. 20, 2019. (Norm Hall/Getty Images)
Trevor Loudon is an author, filmmaker, and public speaker from New Zealand. For more than 30 years, he has researched radical left, Marxist, and terrorist movements and their covert influence on mainstream politics.
Trevor Loudon | The Epoch Times* | August 1, 2019,Updated: August 8, 2019
Commentary
When the Southern Baptists, the largest Protestant denomination in the country, endorse “critical race theory” (CRT), you know American Christianity has a Marxism problem.
At the Southern Baptist national convention in Birmingham, Alabama, in June, a resolution on CRT and “intersectionality” gained passage with a strong majority.
The resolution affirmed the Bible as “the first, last, and sufficient authority” in guiding the church on dealing with social evils and said that “critical race theory and intersectionality should only be used in submission to Scripture,” according to a news article from the Baptist Press. The resolution described critical race theory as a “set of tools to explain how race functions in society and intersectionality as the study of how various characteristics overlap.”
Traditional Baptists who believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of God and contains the answers to all problems within its pages must have wondered why their church would need Marxism for any reason at all.
One brave Christian, Tom Ascol, a senior pastor of Grace Baptist Church in Cape Coral, Florida, unsuccessfully challenged the CRT resolution, correctly explaining that “critical race theory and intersectionality” are “rooted in ideologies that are incompatible with Christianity.”
What Is Critical Race Theory?
So what actually is CRT? What does intersectionality mean?
“CRT recognizes that racism is engrained in the fabric and system of the American society. The individual racist need not exist to note that institutional racism is pervasive in the dominant culture. This is the analytical lens that CRT uses in examining existing power structures. CRT identifies that these power structures are based on white privilege and white supremacy, which perpetuates the marginalization of people of color.”
In other words, racism is about power, it’s exclusively a white problem, and it’s intrinsic in the current social system. Therefore, to end racism, we must change the existing power structures—a polite way of saying revolution. Affirmative action, reparations, and hate speech legislation are all justified by CRT. All are revolutionary tools derived from Marxism.
Intersectionality is the concept that all oppressions are linked. Racial oppression is linked to gay oppression, which, in turn, is linked to the oppression of women and workers. This is a modern expansion of the Marxist idea that “capitalism” oppresses not only workers but racial and gender groups as well. All “oppressions” intersect. We can’t treat them as separate problems. The main problem is not just capitalism, but white racist sexist capitalism.
Two black scholars are most closely identified with modern CRT—the late Harvard Law professor Derrick Bell and the recently deceased James Cone, a professor of Systematic Theology at Union Theological Seminary.
It’s worth noting that a member of the Southern Baptist convention resolutions committee, Walter Strickland, avidly teaches Cone’s theories from his post at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in North Carolina, according to a graduate of the seminary. Strickland seems to have no conflict teaching Cone’s version of race-based Marxism to the future Baptist pastors who stream through his classroom.
James Cone: Religious Revolutionary
There is zero doubt that James Cone was a Marxist.
In 1980, the Democratic Socialists of America published an essay by Cone titled “The Black Church and Marxism: What Do They Have to Say to Each Other?”
In June 1984, a delegation of Black American Church leaders visited Havana.
Granma, the Cuban Communist Party newspaper, reported that the organizers included the communist-controlled Ecumenical Council of Cuba, the Baptist Worker-Student Coordination of Cuba, and the Caribbean Council of Churches. The Black Theology Project was listed as a U.S. sponsor, and the Soviet-controlled Christian Peace Conference was also represented.
Delegates included Rev. Jeremiah Wright of UCC Trinity Church in Chicago, the future pastor to Barack Obama; William Babley, director of the Racial Union Program of the Methodist Church; Howard Dodson, chairman of the Black Theology Project; Dwight Hopkins, vice chairman of the Black Theology Project and a future founder of the communist-led Black Radical Congress; and James Cone of Union Theological Seminary.
Cone was also a little un-Christian in his racial views.
In his 1969 book, “Black Theology and Black Power,” Cone wrote: “The time has come for white America to be silent and listen to black people. … All white men are responsible for white oppression. … Theologically, Malcolm X was not far wrong when he called the white man ‘the devil.’”
In a 2004 essay, Cone opined: “Black suffering is getting worse, not better. … White supremacy is so clever and evasive that we can hardly name it. It claims not to exist, even though black people are dying daily from its poison.”
Derrick Bell: Legal Revolutionary
Derrick Bell, who a young Barack Obama once praised at a Harvard protest rally as comparable to Rosa Parks, was also a man of considerable influence.
According to his 2011 New York Times obituary, Bell’s “1973 book, ‘Race, Racism and American Law,’ became a staple in law schools and is now in its sixth edition.”
Bell “set the agenda in many ways for scholarship on race in the academy, not just the legal academy,” Lani Guinier, told The New York Times. Guinier was the first black woman hired to join Harvard Law School’s tenured faculty and is the daughter of the late leading Communist Party USA member Ewart Guinier.
Bell was a contributor to the journal Freedomways, which has been described as “one of the most influential African-American literary and political journals of the 1960s and 1970s.” Freedomways was established and run by well-documented members and sympathizers of the Communist Party USA.
According to Accuracy in Media, documents declassified in 2011/2012 from Operation SOLO, an FBI program to infiltrate the Communist Party, revealed that Freedomways, which closed in 1986, was subsidized by both the Soviet and Chinese communist parties.
Bell was also a founding member of the National Conference of Black Lawyers, the self-proclaimed “legal arm of the Black Liberation Movement.”
According to an archived page of the organization’s website:
“In 1968, young people of African descent in America were growing impatient with the slow pace of social change. Despite modest advances brought on by two decades of non-violent resistance, from one end of the country to the other, the cry for Black Power was raised in the midst of a sea of clinched fists. At the same time, this new militant spirit had moved many to don black berets and carry rifles. On street corners in practically every Black community, passers-by heard demands for Nation Time and Power to the People!
“Inevitably, the powers-that-be responded to this activist renaissance with police brutality, frame-ups and a vicious counter-intelligence program that targeted scores of militants for harassment, prosecution or assassination. A small group of Black lawyers refused to sit idly by while the iron fist of government came down hard on the bravest and most intelligent of the Black community’s younger generation. This period forced the birth of the National Conference of Black Lawyers which, as an organization, began to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with rifle-toting revolutionaries.”
The National Conference of Black Lawyers was a U.S. affiliate of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, a still-existing international communist front originally founded by the Soviet Union.
Is CRT Compatible With Christianity?
Is CRT compatible with Christianity, or indeed any God-centered faith?
Christianity is based entirely around the individual and his or her relationship with God. It is the individual who may be saved through faith in Jesus Christ, not the collective.
How can a collectivist philosophy that emphasizes racial division above all else and despises all manifestations of individual liberty have anything to offer Christianity? The answer is simple: It doesn’t. CRT is a Marxist technique used to divide society into antagonistic racial groups that can be manipulated to create chaos and revolution.
Are those who bring CRT into the church Christian? Or are they Marxists posing as Christians? Is their true purpose salvation or revolution?
I was told recently of an episode that occurred in a church in North Carolina. The young pastor, all fired up with CRT, noticed that a black family and a white family in his congregation shared the same surname. He falsely concluded that the ancestors of the white family must have once owned the ancestors of the black family. From the pulpit, the pastor demanded that the white family apologize to the black family for the slave-owning sins of their forefathers. The white family bravely refused to apologize for the nonexistent transgression, which created a major split in the church. That church no longer exists.
CRT is not just a Southern Baptist problem. This false Marxist doctrine is taught in churches, seminaries, and universities all across the United States.
Some brave souls are standing against this corrupt doctrine, but hundreds of thousands of seminarians and churchgoers are going along with revolution posing as religion.
The late great Andrew Breitbart used to say that “politics is downstream from culture.” He could have added that “culture is downstream from religion.”
The Southern Baptists, the most conservative major Protestant denomination in the United States, have started down the Marxist road. Several other denominations are well ahead of them. If this isn’t reversed, how will this shift affect our culture and politics in years to come?
Photo: Parishioners sit inside the renovated Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Ga., on Jan. 19, 2002. (Erik S. Lesser/Getty Images)
Trevor Loudon is an author, filmmaker, and public speaker from New Zealand. For more than 30 years, he has researched radical left, Marxist, and terrorist movements and their covert influence on mainstream politics.
Trevor Loudon is an author, filmmaker, and public speaker from New Zealand. For more than 30 years, he has researched radical left, Marxist, and terrorist movements and their covert influence on mainstream politics.