As an instrument of policy, war is a disaster. War is chaos and confusion. However strenuously rationalized as strategic it negates any coherent strategy. The imperious requirements of victory narrow freedom of action to a choice among evils. War invites corruption and subversion and demagoguery and deceit and causes nations to fail and fall, the fruits of victory hardly less bitter than defeat.
That does not matter now. We have been brought to a point where we have no other good choice. It is time for war, brutal, unavoidable war, to smash Hamas, kick the Russians out of Ukraine, destroy the Russian army, and behead the Iranian regime before it goes nuclear.
It does little good now to say it all could have been avoided; that failed US leadership is as much to blame for the war in Europe as it is for Iran’s dominance of the Middle East or the alliance between the two. Those are the very reasons we have no alternative. It is because U.S. foreign policy since 1989 has been so anti-strategic, so fundamentally unserious, so vain, that now we must fight.
Of course, we should not have overthrown Iraq, our most relevant ally against Iran, and especially not for the benefit of Kuwait, a long-standing Soviet ally.
Of course, after 1992 we should have welcomed Russia into Europe, acknowledged Russian fears of NATO, and gradually withdrawn from that alliance leaving Russia and Germany to work out their relationship.
Of course, the Bushes deserve to go down in history with Wilson as the worst Presidents in our history, ever reviled for the blood on their hands and the grievous wounds they inflicted on their country.
Of course, it was all just intolerably stupid and unserious.
It no longer matters. Allowing a Russia confirmed in its enmity to the US and aligned with China allied with Iran to win in Europe would be a disaster. Our Russian strategy should have had one single objective: to keep the Chinese worried about their western flank. Instead, we now need to worry about our eastern flank. For that the Russians must be not only defeated but diminished. If we cannot have them as an ally, we must have them as an example.
Blessedly, this may now be possible to do with little loss of American blood. With the Russians and the Ukrainians pinned down in a macabre reenactment of the first World War, interdiction of vulnerable Russian supply lines from the air would be decisive. The war of attrition ends the day the Russians at the front run out of ammunition.
As for “widening the war” or inviting nuclear retaliation, we have every right to bomb Ukrainian territory with Ukraine’s permission. We should make that clear publicly. Privately we should make clear to the Russians what we will do if they threaten to go nuclear. There are times when being the only country in the history of the world crazy enough to have used the atom bomb is convenient.
Our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan squandered the nation’s resolve to take on Iran. That resolve must be recaptured. We cannot let them get nukes; our problems then would make today’s look like a silly game.
With luck we might avoid a ground war. The mullahs have invested so much in their navy and air force that destroying both, along with their oil fields, might be enough to bring them to the table. Once there the only acceptable bargain would be to allow us to destroy all their nuclear sites. They will give in; we have nukes, and they don’t, yet.
At the very least, we should never let another drop of Iranian oil get up from the ground.
In the aftermath the mullahs are unlikely to survive
It would be horrible to see American soldiers dying in Gaza. Yet, thanks to the Bush family’s adventures, the awful truth is that the American army is the best in the world at the bloody task of rooting out a guerrilla army, house to house, block by city block. Perhaps if we deal with Iran it won’t come to that.
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No comments on The stakes now
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Conservatism is famously difficult to define. Some have suggested that the only thing unifying the right is opposition to the left. Others say that a rejection of pure egalitarianism, and the acceptance of some inequalities or hierarchies in society is the key theme of the right.
In the United States, conservatism does seem to have some basic content to it, however. This conservatism emerged after World War II. While it draws on some prewar threads like classical liberalism, in my view postwar American conservatism represents something basically new.
The content of this movement has been described as the “three-legged stool” consisting of free market economics, traditionalism (or social conservatism), and anti-communism (or an aggressive foreign policy posture).
In his book Right Wing Critics of American Conservatism, professor George Hawley astutely notes that there’s nothing about these three things that naturally seem to go together to make up conservatism. He writes:
In the contemporary context, when we describe an American as politically conservative, we typically mean that this person favors limited government intervention in the economy, adheres to a traditional religious faith and believes these religious values should influence public policy, and generally favors a strong military presence abroad. Without knowing any context, there is no a priori reason one would infer that these three attributes are correlated with each other, or even that they are necessarily right wing. These policy preferences were not always associated with each other. The formation of the coherent conservative movement we know today can be traced no farther than the mid-twentieth century.
The postwar conservative consensus is clearly in trouble, threatened by the collapse of the Soviet Union that removed the anti-communist “glue” holding the movement together, the decline of religion in the US (my “negative world”), and the rejection of this policy set by the voters of the Republican Party (populism).
Any sort of new, viable conservatism in the US needs to update the product on offer. In that regard, it’s good to look at other forms of conservatism – not necessarily to adopt them wholesale, but to stimulate our thinking about what conservatism could or should be.
At first glance, the international jet set magazine Moncole would not seem to be a place to look for a conservative ethos. Both its founder-editorial director Tyler Brûlé, and his right hand man, editor-in-chief Andrew Tuck, are gay, which codes left in our world. And the magazine is unapologetically globalist in orientation. While based in London and Zurich, each issue includes dispatches from every corner of the globe. Brûlé’s columns, which used to run in the Financial Times but now appear in Monocle’s Sunday newsletter, are typically filed from an airplane en route to some far flung business capital. The topics the magazine covers – architecture and design, contemporary art, travel, urban exploration, fashion, etc – tend to code left at first glance as well.
Yet a recent reader “quiz” that he put in his column suggests conservative undertones. Here are some of the questions:
- Question #3: Have you noticed this one? Many booksellers still love wearing masks and working behind plexiglass. Why?
- Question #4: One more on this theme. It was weird the first time round but why are there still people driving around alone in their vehicles wearing masks?
- Question #6: As the northern hemisphere moves into cosy season, there’ll soon be a shift to more candlelight – real and LED. Like the question above, what’s better for the future of our fragile planet but also for our soul?
- Question #8: Your head of HR has told you that one of your staffers in your sales team identifies as a Persian cat and would like a carpeted pole to rub against next to their desk. Who do you fire first?
These questions obviously code right in an American context.
Indeed, if we pan back and think about it a bit, Monocle magazine has a strong conservative ethos in important respects. Some of those are:
- Monocle believes in natural hierarchy. Some things — whether it be a piece of furniture, the design of a hotel, or a transit system — are simply better than others. This is an aristocratic hierarchy of excellence, but a genuine hierarchy nevertheless. Monocle cares about and advocates for the best.
- Monocle believes in objective reality. It’s not just that they think some things are better than others. They believe some things actually are better than others. Also, Brûlé retains a belief in objective reporting — a belief in objective truth — something he has had to insist on in the face of restless agitating by his younger staff. (He addresses this point in a podcast he did with the head of a Swiss media company). Monocle has a strong point of view it is very transparent about, but within that, it tries to get the facts straight. You see this, for example, in the way they might criticize Victor Orban, but yet continue to celebrate the virtues of Hungary and Budapest as well. Or how they openly disagree with the views on sexuality in Middle East countries, but don’t use that as an excuse to simply write off Gulf cities as horrible and retrograde.
- Localism and affirming distinct local cultures. Monocle actually champions the unique local culture and traditions of the places it profiles. To be clear, when these localist values come into conflict with globalist ones, the globalist ones always triumph. But the magazine resists the homogenization of culture and the generic “AirSpace.”
- A preference for small businesses. They don’t oppose big business, but want thriving small business and entrepreneurship sectors. (They produce an annual special issue called The Entrepreneurs as well as a podcast on the topic).
- Favors artisanal, craft manufacturing. In fact, Monocle was an early supporter of preserving manufacturing in developed world countries and cities. …
- Techno-skepticism. Monocle has never been luddite, and often features high tech gizmos and companies. At the same time, they were founded as a champion of print in an era of digital. They do not, I believe, even have social media accounts. The LED question above gets to this. Technology is great, but can’t be allowed to displace the human.
- Monocle has resisted wokeness. Undoubtedly some wokeness has creeped it. It’s a matter of commercial necessity. But when the BLM movement blew up in much of the world, Monocle didn’t really join in. They feature many black people, coverage of African countries, etc. — but they always did that. As you can see from the questions about masks and transkittenism, Brûlé clearly thinks a lot of things have gone too far.
- They have held frame. If you compare Monocle today to its original incarnation 15 years ago, it’s remarkably similar in terms of ethos and aesthetics. Compare it to Kinfolk magazine, which exploded in influence about the same time. Kinfolk was attacked for being too white, and the magazine radically changed to the point that it is no longer even the same publication. And, I should add, not worth reading today. Monocle has maintained what I have called “missional integrity”
- Even their fashion spreads are pretty normal. Today’s fashion world tends to be either very outré or strongly streetwear inflected. Monocle’s fashion sensibility is very traditional, conservative, understated (though does adopt some trends, including some unfortunate ones like high water trousers). The models in Monocle’s own fashion shoots skew white and East Asian, mirroring the readership of the publication. Whereas most luxury labels today emphasize black models along with white ones, and have remarkably few Asian faces given the amount of luxury purchases being made by Asian consumers. This again shows the Monocle resistance to wokeness.
Some of these items like localism and techno-skepticism could definitely be left as well as right. In fact, until recently in America, you probably would have said they were on the left. But we’ve seen a recently rising right wing sensibility that embraces them as well. I certainly view them as inherently conservative in the sense of resisting change.
What I see here is a kind of traditionally aristocratic, elitist conservatism of the type that I imagine might have once thrived in Europe. It champions a hierarchy of genuine talent and excellence; defends the local, the small scale, and the analogue; and presents itself as high status.
This is quite the contrast with the increasingly proletarian and low status American conservatism, which seems doomed unless it is able to attract more elites. Monocle shows a path to a kind of conservative approach that is potentially high status and elite attractive.
I don’t want to claim Monocle is some bastion of conservatism from an American conservative perspective. And it also has its flaws, such as being too precious at times, and not infrequently coming across as a parody of itself. But there’s a lot to learn from their sort of de facto elite conservative ethos.
Monocle is also an interesting example of how recent cultural shifts have exposed things that were previously hidden. It’s no surprise to me that Brûlé (age 54) and Tuck (55) are Generation X. Generation X figures have become disruptors in our world today. And we now can see that there’s often a conservative sensibility in Generation X gay culture. Multiple Gen X gays who would never have previously been viewed as conservative have now been reclassified as such. Think novelist Bret Easton Ellis (Less Than Zero, American Psycho) or journalist Glenn Greenwald.
I put Brûlé and Tuck into this same category. In a proper country, I wouldn’t be surprised if Brûlé voted for the center-right party. I also suspect both of them are even more conservative than they let on publicly, but they are disciplined enough to limit their public statements to what doesn’t threaten their commercial interests.
I wrote a lengthy article on E. Digby Baltzell, the sociologist who popularized the term WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) before. So I won’t repeat everything here. But Baltzell represented another form a aristocratic conservatism. He believed that members of a hereditary upper class should dominate the elite positions of society. His criticism of the WASPs was not that they did dominate, but rather that they refused to assimilate new men of merit into their ranks for reason of religion or race, and that they were actually not engaging in the public leadership he wanted.
An interviewer with Pennsylvania History magazine wrote in 1996:
The brief discussion about Penn not only set the tone for much of our conversation. It encapsulated in less than a minute the moral Baltzell has been trying to convey to Americans for his entire scholarly life: democracy requires a responsible, civic-minded elite — and therefore an elite open to talent — which conveys standards by precept and example to a populace which must be led by someone. The alternative is not egalitarian, benign pluralism or participatory democracy, but a deteriorating situation in which money becomes the only measure of success, and an irresponsible, selfish elite sets the tone for everyone.
Although he didn’t take much notice of it over his life, Baltzell was pretty contemptuous of the postwar conservative movement and the modern Republican Party:
A reviewer of my book for the [Philadelphia] Inquirer said: don’t think that because Baltzell is a conservative that he’s sympathetic with [Newt] Gingrich. The answer to that is: I’m a conservative; Gingrich is a rightist. He’s not a conservative, he’s a populist, and no conservative was ever a populist. I think in that way he might be dangerous.
Note here the fundamentally elitist, anti-populist idea of what it means to be conservative.
A part of Baltzell’s conservative vision was that the elite (which, remember, should be dominated by members of an upper class), needed to have divided politics, both liberal and conservative, Republican and Democrat. In this he deliberately takes on Marx, who would have said the elite must be uniform in their politics because of class interest. This was not historically true in the US, but unfortunately is becoming increasingly the case. In Baltzell’s world, the fact that leaders of both political factions would come from the same upper class would prevent political conflict from blowing the country apart. He says (drawing on his book Sporting Gentlemen about tennis that was released at the time of this interview):
Well, the conservatives are in now but there’s a lot of paranoia. A very important thing is not to hate the opposition. That’s where sports are terrible important, and I think we are losing that, because now winning is everything. That’s hopeless, and in politics to win permanently is a totalitarian state. You want to win, shake hands, and fight another day, and also know you’re not always right.
Baltzell also describes a theme I’ve returned to many times, which is the loss of genuine locally rooted, locally committed, civic minded elites:
WB: The general thrust of the book is that tennis has gone the way of many things, from a gentleman’s game to a way to make money. Tennis illustrates your general point about America, that there used to be local elites with at least some sense of civic responsibility, whereas now money is all that matters.
DB: That’s true for everybody, even college presidents. When Sheldon Hackney left as President of Penn, he was the only man in the upper administration who had been there ten years. And none of them were graduates of Penn. Thirty years ago, almost all of them were. Now I don’t approve of that, but I don’t approve of having nobody, and they come and go, they have no loyalty, and they’re like business executives.
Baltzell also points out that the American upper class, which was conservative at the time, did not understand the value of the culture center — did not value the center cities. They left for their country estates and turned their backs on the city. This disconnected them from the other classes of society, from what was going on in the country. And ceded the highest value geography of the country to more liberal elements.
DB: I live here in the city [Rittenhouse Square], not on the Main Line. I feel I ought to be confronted with crime, street begging, and the tragedy of what’s happening to this city….There are now families on the Main Line who have never been in town.
WP: Is this because the elite abdicated or have they been pushed out?
DB: They haven’t been pushed out. They can live here. I’m living here. I’m breathing. I hate to tell you, Rittenhouse Square when I was a kid young was entirely WASP. Now it’s predominantly Jewish. I hand it to the Jewish people – they’ve always stayed in town. Now they’re an infinitely urban people. One of the things about the WASP is he’s a frontiersman. He’s a country person. The average Frenchman can’t want to get into Paris and get on the back of a woman. The average Englishman can wait to get into the country and get on the back of his horse. My woman students go crazy at that, but it’s true!
It’s also clear that Baltzell believes in traditional morality and WASP restraint. He notes positively that the girls he grew up with were mostly virgins when they got married. In another essay included in his anthology Judgment and Sensibility he wrote:
Finally, if one may be allowed to bare one’s private fantasies, I should suggest that if all the young girls growing up in America today were to marry the first boy they every kissed, in the style of our First Lady [Barbara Bush], our beleaguered land would be well on its way to solving the tragic problems of poverty, AIDS, and abortion.
Back to the Pennsylvania History interview, he inveighs against political correctness, and particularly how group identity had replaced personal morality:
One of the tragedies now is that to be anti-black, anti-Semitic, or anti-any group is more of a transgression than to be a bloody liar or an adulterer. Personal morality is changed into group morality, and it will never work.
Keep in mind that Baltzell wrote entire books criticizing ethnic and religious bias. His point is the decline of personal morality.
Baltzell provides another important perspective that can help us rethink what it means to be a conservative. His vision is elite, high status oriented; based on high standards for personal virtue, conduct, and civic mindedness; and a more urban friendly point of view that understands the power of the cultural center. He understands clearly that it’s not possible to build a nation on populism, which is a race to the bottom in standards. (What various people have referred to as the Jerry Springerization of conservatism is a direct outgrowth of this).
I don’t agree with everything Baltzell says. Although I am not a populist, populism is a needed force in society, too, in its proper place. It provides an important signal to the elite that all is not well, and that the elites are misgoverning. It can at least hope to disrupt an ossified system. Baltzell also was never able to provide the same critical assessment of the minorities he championed that he gave to the WASPs. At the same time, he was deeply insightful about America and provides lessons that America’s postwar conservative movement never understood.
These are just two alternative conservative visions to the ones on offer in America. There are surely many others we could have looked at as well. I do think it’s important to look at society and the failed American conservative project through these other lenses to help understand what went wrong and what elements might need to be incorporated into any healthier future conservative vision.
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Today in 1814, Adolph Sax was born in Belgium. Sax would fashion from brass and a clarinet reed the saxophone, a major part of early rock and jazz.
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Today in 1956, Nat King Cole became the first black man to host a TV show, on NBC:
The number one single today in 1966:
Today in 1971, Elvis Presley performed at the Met Center in Bloomington, Minn. To get the fans to leave after repeated encore requests, announcer Al Dvorin announced, “Elvis has left the building.”
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Today in 1963, John Lennon showed his ability to generate publicity at the Beatles’ performance at the Royal Variety Show at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London. The Queen Mother and Princess Margaret were in attendance, so perhaps they were the target of Lennon’s comment, “In the cheaper seats you clap your hands. The rest of you, just rattle your jewelry.”
Lennon would demonstrate his PR skills a couple of years later when he proclaimed the Beatles were “bigger than Jesus.”
The number one single today in 1965:
The number one single today in 1972:
Today in 1990, Melissa Ethridge and her “life partner” Julie Cypher appeared on the cover of Newsweek magazine for its cover story on gay parenting.
I bring this up only to point out that Etheridge and Cypher no longer are life partners, Cypher (the ex-wife of actor Lou Diamond Phillips) is now married to another man, and Etheridge became engaged to another woman, but they split before their planned California wedding. And, by the way, Cypher had two children from the “contribution” of David Crosby, and Etheridge’s second woman had children from another man. And, by the way, Newsweek is no longer a weekly magazine.
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The name of the violent radical left group Antifa stands for “antifascist action.” On twitter you will sometimes see people say to those criticizing Antifa, “Antifa stands for anti-fascist. So if you don’t like Antifa, you must support fascism.”
(Antifa is actually more fascist than whom it claims is “fascist.” Side point.)
The term “servant leadership” functions similarly in evangelical circles. They embue the phrase with particular, specific meanings that transform it from a self-evidently good concept into an evangelical term of art. If you criticize those meanings, you might be accused supporting selfish leadership.
Servant leadership properly understood is an almost self-evident virtue. Of course we want leaders who lead in the genuine service of others and of the institutions they direct.
But there are problems with the way evangelicals talk about servant leadership, particularly when it comes to married men. It’s part of why men turn to online influencers instead of the church. As I noted in my WSJ op-ed on that topic, online influencers provide an aspirational vision of manhood. Traditional authorities like the church provide a “servant leader” vision that is extremely unappealing, and, more importantly, wrong in important ways.
Conservative evangelicals, ones who hold to the so-called complementarian gender theology, affirm that husbands are the head of the home. This is heavily qualified, however, and one such qualification is that headship means service rather than authority. Or at least to the extent that such authority exists, it can only be used for service.
The term “servant leader” was present early in the complementarian movement, though was not especially stressed. John Piper, in his opening chapter from the complementarian ur-text Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, wrote, “The call to leadership is a call to humble oneself and take the responsibility to be a servant-leader in ways that are appropriate to every differing relationship to women.” But the world servant leader only occurs a handful of times in this long book. (I haven’t come across Wayne Grudem, the other principal architect of complementarianism, using it).
Women’s studies professor Mary Kassian, who was among the originators of complementarianism, echoed Piper when she wrote, “Men have a responsibility to exercise headship in their homes and church family, and Christ revolutionized the definition of what that means. Authority is not the right to rule—-it’s the responsibility to serve.”
British evangelical John Stott, shaped in a different tradition but who was a sort of soft complementarian, uses similar language to deny that headship means authority but does mean responsibility. He wrote, “Headship implies some degree of leadership, which, however, is expressed not in terms of ‘authority’ but of ‘responsibility.’” (From Decisive Issues Facing Christians Today).
The main popularizer of the term “servant leader” as applied to husbands today may well be Tim Keller. In their very popular book The Meaning of Marriage, Tim and Kathy Keller write:
But an even bigger leap was required to understand that it took an equal degree of submission for for men to submit to their gender roles. They are called to be “servant leaders.” In our world, we are accustomed to seeing the perks and privileges accrue to those who have higher status…..But in the dance of the Trinity, the greatest is the one who is most self-effacing, most sacrificial, most devoted to the good of the other…Jesus redefined all authority as servant-authority. Any exercise of power can only be done in service to the Other, not to please oneself.
Nancy Pearcey’s new book The Toxic War on Masculinity has an entire chapter that expands on this topic. She’s gotten a lot of flack over it. While I think it’s fair to say she probably draws from some egalitarian (Christian feminist) leaning material, she’s basically only summing up what conservative evangelicals actually do teach. Here’s just one short passage:
For example, a man attending a nondenominational church said, “Being the head doesn’t mean that you’re a ruler or something. It’s more of a responsibility.” A middle-aged Charismatic man said, “I have learned that being the head, as you say, is really being a servant because you got to swallow hard and put somebody else first.” A Presbyterian woman said a biblical concept of headship “actually makes his burden even heavier, because he is also supposed to be the kind of man that can hear his wife’s needs, that can be there for his wife, that can respect his wife . . . and that’s a big responsibility.”
James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, explains that when a man gets married, he stops living for his own ambitions and instead channels his energies into supporting his family: “He discovers a sense of pride—yes, masculine pride— because he is needed by his wife and family.” Needed not only for protection and financial provision, but also for love and affection.
Because Jesus said that he came not to be served, but to serve, these people would all seem to be on solid ground. But there are some problems with the way they talk about this. I will address two of them today.
The matter of servant leadership immediately prompts certain questions:
- What is the service to be provided?
- To whom?
- Who makes those decisions?
- Who decides whether or not the man is doing a good job at serving?
These are pretty fundamental. But evangelicals tend not to address them explicitly. This is the first problem. Their patterns of rhetoric, however, imply that that servant leadership essentially means catering to the desires of your wife and children. And if that’s the case, they also implicitly get to be the judge of whether you are doing a good job.
Kathy Keller said in a Family Life Today interview that, “A head’s job is to use their authority to please, meet needs, and serve. A head does not get all the perks, all the privileges—you know, choose control of the remote—all this—pick the color of the car you buy, etc. Your headship is expressed in servant-hood, primarily.” There’s a similar line in The Meaning of Marriage. “He does not use his headship selfishly, to get his own way about the color of the car they buy, who gets to hold the remote control, and whether he has a ‘night out with the boys’ or stays home to help with the kids when his wife asks him.”
We see here that clearly the correct answer is for him to say home and help with the kids when his wife asks him. This is an example of the patterns of rhetoric used to suggests servant leadership means catering to your wife’s desires. “Please, meet needs, and serves” sounds like what a restaurant waiter does.
They are even more direct later in the book, writing, “Jesus never did anything to please himself. A servant-leader must sacrifice his wants and needs to please and build up his partner.” Note that the husband must not only sacrifice his wants but his actual needs as well to “please” his partner. Following Jesus, he’s never to do anything to please himself.
Mark Driscoll operates similarly. In newsletter #77 I quoted him saying:
There are, however, moments in the marriage where the husband and wife don’t agree. And we’re not talking here about a lesser, secondary issue. It’s date night and he wants steak and she wants fish and they can’t agree on where to go. Those are easy. Just give her what she wants. Those are easy. Just love her, just serve her, do what she wants.
Most of the time, husbands are simply to give their wives whatever they want, even if the wife is behaving selfishly.
Russell Moore said similarly in his book The Storm-Tossed Family:
A husband’s leadership is about a special accountability for sabotaging his own wants and appetites with a forward-looking plan for the best interest of his wife and children. Headship is not about having one’s laundry washed or one’s meals cooked or one’s sexual drives met, but rather about constantly evaluating how to step up first to lay one’s life down for one’s family.
The quotes in the previous section also lean in this direction.
In their book Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, Christian Smith and Melina Lundquist Denton describe the beliefs of teenagers as “moralistic therapeutic deism,” in which “God is something like a combination Divine Butler and Cosmic Therapist.”
This sounds remarkably like how the evangelical idea of the servant leader works in practice.
Evangelicals have an incredibly bleak view of what it means to be a married man. The basically teach that his job is to be his wife’s manservant. And this isn’t even all of the negatives when it comes to complementarianism. They literally theologically teach that everything that happens is the man’s fault, for example.
Going back to my WSJ op-ed, I contrast this vision of masculinity with that on offer from online men’s influencers:
Many influencers offer teenage boys an aspirational vision of manhood. Some, like Mr. Peterson, say men are important for the sake of others, but present it as part of a heroic vision of masculinity in which men flourish as well. “You have some vital role to play in the unfolding destiny of the world,” he writes in “12 Rules for Life,” his 2018 bestseller. “You are, therefore, morally obliged to take care of yourself.” Traditional authorities, especially in Protestant churches, talk about men being “servant leaders” but reduce that primarily to self-sacrifice and serving others. Pastors preach sermons wondering why men have so much energy left at the end of the day, or saying men shouldn’t have time for hobbies. No wonder young men tune them out.
Of course, if the Bible says something, we have to do it even if we don’t like it. So let’s take a look at that.
Where do they get this idea of service? One common illustration for why husbands are called to be servant leaders of this type is the foot washing episode in the upper room. Again from the Kellers’ Meaning of Marriage:
In John 13:1-17, Jesus, on the night before his death, famously washed his disciples feet, both showing and teaching them how he was defining authority and headship. He said:
Do you understand what I have done for you? … You call me “Teacher” and “Lord” and rightly so, for that is what I am. Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you should also wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you. I tell you the truth, no servant is greater than his master.
The master has just made himself into a servant who has washed his disciples’ feet, thus demonstrating in the most dramatic way that authority and leadership mean that you become the servant, you die to self in order to love and serve the Other.
John Piper also refers to this, writing, “Leaders are to be servants in sacrificially caring for the souls of the people. But this does not make them less than leaders, as we see in the words obey and submit. Jesus was no less leader of the disciples when He was on His knees washing their feet than when He was giving them the Great Commission.”
Yet in this very passage, Peter initially refuses to allow Jesus to wash his feet, saying “Never shall you wash my feet!” It was only when he was told that if he did not allow Jesus to wash his feet then “you have no part with me” that he relented.
We learn two things from that. First, Jesus did not always allow other people to determine the manner in which he served them. He made that decision. Secondly, some people don’t want to allow Jesus to serve them the way he choses to, and by doing so they are in rebellion against him.
We see this with Peter again in another passage. The context of Christ saying he came to serve was specifically regarding his crucification. He said, “The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many.” (Mark 10:45). But when Jesus told his disciples he was going to be killed, what did Peter say? “God forbid it, Lord! This shall never happen to you.” (Matt 16:22). To which Jesus responded, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are not setting your mind on God’s interests, but man’s.”
Again, we see the Jesus’s followers don’t get to define how he serves them, and that they can be in rebellion against him by arguing against the service he wants to provide. I don’t see these parallels being made with regards to marriage.
There are many other things Jesus also said. He told people to keep his commandments (John 14:15). Jesus frequently issued commands. He allows Peter’s mother-in-law to serve him after healing her (Matthew 8:15). He also said, “For I have come down from heaven, not to do My own will, but the will of Him who sent Me.” (John 6:38). This provides another lens to see Jesus’ role on earth, namely mission. And of course, if the Father was in authority over the Son dwelling in flesh with us, then the fact that the Father sent him to die horribly on our behalf is yet another lens on authority. Indeed, we see that even today fathers send their sons to die in battle in defense of the nation, something hard to square with the evangelical servant leader idea. Jesus also sent out his disciples two by two to preach repentance, cast out demons, and heal the sick. This also shows his authority being used for the sake of mission.
There seem to be a vast array of Biblical examples that fall outside of what evangelicals teach about husbands and servant leadership.
I always say that I’m not a theologian or Bible teacher. Maybe there’s a good response to all of these points. They key is – they are never addressed. The vision of service, leadership, and authority they draw from the Bible is highly curated and limited in scope when it comes to men.
A second way their servant leadership concept fails is in the way it excludes mission.
Complementarianism was developed in response to the feminist movement during the 1980s. And it was clearly influenced by that environment. We see this in the fact that its teachings are primarily restricted in scope to two matters: men as head of the home and a male-only pastorate. While leading architect John Piper himself takes a more expansive view of gender complementarity, most of the complementarian works, including by him, are restricted to these two matters. Additionally, even these two matters are treated as essentially arbitrary decisions by God. They deny that men are by nature better suited than women to be the head of the home, for example.
I’m not going to provide detailed support for these points today, but just as one example, John Piper once wrote, “The roles of leadership and submission in the marriage are not based on competence. God never said that the man is appointed to be head because he is more competent or that the woman is appointed to submission because she is less competent.”
While saying that men and women are different, complementarians are typically vague and unspecific about what they mean by that (unless it involves making a negative statement about male qualities or a positive statement about female ones).
The practical implication of this is that their definition of gender gets limited solely to relationships with the opposite sex. John Piper defines “biblical masculinity” this way in Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood:
AT THE HEART OF MATURE MASCULINITY IS A SENSE OF BENEVOLENT RESPONSIBILITY TO LEAD, PROVIDE FOR AND PROTECT WOMEN IN WAYS APPROPRIATE TO A MAN’S DIFFERING RELATIONSHIPS.
“AT THE HEART OF….”
This phrase signals that the definitions are not exhaustive. There is more to masculinity and femininity, but there is not less. We believe this is at the heart of what true manhood means, even if there is a mystery to our complementary existence that we will never exhaust. [caps in original]
While acknowledging there’s more to manhood, this defines masculinity exclusively in terms of relationship to women, dramatically restricting the scope of masculine vocation.
In light of this definition, it becomes clear why they implicitly define servant leadership as catering to the desires of a man’s wife and children. Their conception of manhood is limited only to this domain.
This leads to the false dichotomy pattern I’ve written about elsewhere. The Meaning of Marriage says:
The husband’s authority (like the Son’s over us) is never used to please himself but only to serve the interests of his wife. Headship does not mean a husband simply “makes all the decisions,” nor does it mean he gets his way in every disagreement. Why? Jesus never did anything to please himself (Romans 15:2-3). A servant-leader must sacrifice his wants and needs to please and build up his partner (Ephesians 5:21ff). [emphasis in original]
We see here a false choice presented between “pleasing himself” and “serving the interests of his wife.” Again, Russell Moore spoke similarly, saying, “Headship is not about having one’s laundry washed or one’s meals cooked or one’s sexual drives met, but rather about constantly evaluating how to step up first to lay one’s life down for one’s family.” There’s again this false choice between naked selfishness and sacrificing for wife and children.
There are actually many possible other choices available. I’ve asked before, but when Tim Keller made the choice to go to New York and start Redeemer Presbyterian Church, was he pleasing himself or serving the interests of his wife? Obviously, neither. He did it for the sake of mission, and despite his wife’s belief that moving to New York was a bad idea. In fact, they used this story in the book as their example of what headship should look like.
The objects of service in the Bible are clearly not always limited to man’s wife and children. Peter brought his wife along with him in the support of his apostolic mission, for example.
The evangelical definition of manhood, by equating a man’s mission with serving his wife and kids, orients the household inwardly and denies outward mission. There’s something wrong with this.
I don’t think they really believe this. We can see that from the way the Kellers use the decision to start Redeemer Pres as an example. But when they are giving instructions about men, manhood, and marriage, this is what they tend to teach. I’m not sure why they do it, but their pre-commitment to a de facto form of modern gender sameness almost mandates this outcome. Unlike influencers such as Jordan Peterson or Jack Donovan, they are, with rare exceptions, unwilling to strongly articulate substantive gender complementarity. Thus, the only thing that distinguishes a man qua man is the way he relates to his wife.
In these evangelical teachings, a man has no legitimate claims of his own he can assert, no legitimate desires or aspirations he can hold, no mission in the world to undertake. A black man might be able to raise a valid claim for justice in their world, but only because he’s black not because he’s a man. Masculinity is reduced to self-sacrifice and service, primarily to his wife and children.
This isn’t right. It seems to be derived from a highly circumscribed reading of the Bible under the influence of second wave feminism (creating a system renowned sociologist James Davison Hunter once called “doublespeak”). I’ve also never seen a convincing historic pedigree for this kind of thought and practice. The people who teach this bad form of servant leadership don’t even live it out themselves. Most of them appear to be very ambitious, very professionally successful, and very much focused on mission outside the home, not service to their wife and kids. Men are right to turn away from this.
We definitely need servant leadership. But the way they define it isn’t right.
I consider correcting these faulty teachings on gender to be one of the most important to do’s in getting the church ready for the negative world. It’s critical to our own community strength, the well-being of our families – and mission to reach all those men (and women) turning to online influencers.
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The number one single today in 1956:
Britain’s number one single today in 1960:
The number one single today in 1962:
Today in 1964, a fan at a Rolling Stones concert fell out of the balcony of Public Hall in Cleveland. That prompted Cleveland Mayor Ralph Locker to ban pop music concerts in the city, saying, “Such groups do not add to the community’s culture or entertainment.” Kind of ironic that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ended up in Cleveland.
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It’s a familiar response whenever the National Weather Service warns of a Category 5 hurricane, a life-threatening winter blizzard or some other looming natural disaster. Government officials urge local citizens to seek shelter immediately, while promising that area police will keep guard to ensure that looters do not use the emergency to rob boarded-up homes and abandoned stores.
Today, Americans are being warned to brace for another kind of storm, one involving not the weather but their personal finances. Economic experts as diverse as Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio, Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, Allianz advisor Mohamed El-Erian and former Harvard president Larry Summers are all predicting that the US will soon experience a major monetary upheaval as a result of the country’s unwieldy $33.5 trillion debt. As legendary investor Jim Rogers recently put it, “No nation has ever been as deeply in debt as the US is, and that cannot be good… Somebody’s going to suffer.”
Yet sadly, the government’s traditional sense of obligation to protect citizens from those who would take advantage of them during a life-threatening weather event does not extend to the coming financial tempest. Over the last decade, according to a recent study by Americans for Tax Reform, annual spending by America’s fifty state governments — excluding what they passed on from Washington — increased 51.7 percent. And total annual spending by the federal government itself rose 69.4 percent over the same period — more than three times as fast as the 21.6 percent increase in population growth, adjusted for inflation.
A close examination of the most recent jobs reports from the US Department of Labor is even more revealing. Of the 336,000 new positions added to the American economy in September, 96,000 were at some level of government. Include the 41,000 new spots that were created in government-subsidized healthcare, and 137,000 — or more than 40 percent — of all the jobs currently being filled are in the public sector.
What all this means is that federal, state and local governments have put themselves in a position to appear to economize when the coming fiscal crisis finally hits, but even after cosmetic cuts continue spending far more than if their growth had been responsibly limited. Meanwhile, all the policies that currently make public services far larger and more costly than necessary will still be on the books.
Take the example of President Biden’s deceptively named Inflation Reduction Act, which among other things creates a huge federal “Climate Corps.” As described by Presidential Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi, this force is slated to employ millions of people “to do the essential work of averting climate catastrophe and building a fair and equitable new economy” — even though no one has ever said exactly what this work would involve.
In deep blue states like New York, Democrat politicians have not even tried to disguise their use of climate legislation to guarantee a post-fiscal crisis expansion of government. The Albany legislature’s Climate Action Council, for instance, has recently published its “Scoping Plan,” which commits the Empire State to funding at least 300,000 highly-paid emissions control jobs over the coming years, completely regardless of whatever environmental technologies are actually in use at the time.
Still in place are all the federal and local education policies which mandate such cumbersome public school administrative structures that half the country’s districts have more non-instructional personnel than teachers. (The Chicago Board of Education, which currently has 3,300 employees, is larger than the entire Japanese Ministry of Education.) Unchanged as well are the so-called Certificate of Need (COD) laws which in thirty-five states prevent entrepreneurs from lowering local healthcare costs by competing with local hospital, ambulatory care, and medical testing monopolies.
And just to make sure that future public and quasi-public spending is paid for by a less affluent post-crisis electorate, the president’s Inflation Reduction Act conveniently dedicates $79.6 billion to the hiring 87,000 additional IRS agents. Last spring, the new GOP House did manage to trim $20 billion of this proposed funding as part of its budget compromise with the Senate, but the resulting $59.6 billion for new tax collectors remains an effective cudgel.
As America’s painful reckoning with the widely predicted fiscal crises gets ever closer, a growing number of commentators have expressed surprise that so many consumers are still splurging on expensive holiday excursions — what has come to be called “revenge travel.” Initially financed by the savings many had accumulated during Covid, this extended spree has since pushed the nation’s cumulative credit card debt to an all-time high of over $1 trillion. Instead of putting aside money to protect themselves from the looming financial squeeze, notes Wall Street Journal economics reporter Rachel Wolfe, the public is literally “spending like there’s no tomorrow.”
But is it really any wonder that so many people would be living for the present when their own government’s selfish response to the last national crisis — the pandemic itself — is still fresh in their minds?
Politicians were caught vacationing and partying while their constituents were commanded to lock down. Teacher union members across the country got paid not to show up for work while the intellectual development of millions of school children was stunted for lack of classroom learning. Government officials even colluded with social media to make sure that those who questioned the official orthodoxy with respect to the origins of Covid or how to treat it were bullied into silence.
If there is a fatalistic abandon afflicting American voters on the eve of what many experts predict will be an unprecedented financial cataclysm, only half of it likely stems from a fear of the fiscal crisis itself. The other half quite reasonably flows from the public’s suspicion of what happens in the aftermath: a grossly disproportionate allocation of the subsequent pain between the government and the people it supposedly exists to serve.
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Wisconsinites know that the first radio station was what now is WHA in Madison. Today in 1920, the nation’s first commercial radio station, KDKA in Pittsburgh, went on the air.
The number one British single today in 1956 is the only number one song cowritten by a vice president, Charles Dawes:
The number one song today in 1974:
The number one British album today in 1985 was Simple Minds’ “Once Upon a Time” …
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Today begins with a non-music anniversary: Today in 1870, the U.S. Weather Bureau was created, later to become the National Weather Service.
Tomorrow in 1870, the first complaints were made about the Weather Bureau’s being wrong about its forecast.
Today in 1946, two New York radio stations changed call letters. WABC, owned by CBS, became (natch) WCBS, paving the way for WJZ, owned by ABC, to become (natch) WABC seven years later. WEAF changed its call letters to WNBC.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 