Conversation With Michael Foster | EAN Special

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All right. So, Zach Conover, Communications Director with End Abortion Now.

00:06

Obviously, I'm a part of Apologia Studios up here on Apologia Radio. But we're joined today by Michael Foster out of Batavia, Ohio.

00:16

I'm pretty sure that most people that listen to our content know who you are. Cool. Maybe take just a minute, though.

00:22

I mean, I know you're an author, you're a pastor, but what if people don't know who you are?

00:29

Could you fill that out a little bit for us? Sure. I'm married with eight kids. My wife, family, and I have five boys, three girls.

00:36

And we live in Batavia, as you said, which is right outside of Cincinnati, Ohio. It's like about 35 minutes from downtown.

00:43

Fairly rural. And I planted a church there in 2020, East River Church. That's outside of my family.

00:50

It's my first commitment. But I write on a variety of issues. Men issues been something that I've spent a lot of time on the last several years.

00:59

I wrote that book, It's Good to Be a Man. Got to do a documentary with Canon Plus on that book.

01:04

That was fun. Yeah. I caught that too. Very good. Yeah. I'm a pastor. I'm a dad.

01:10

I try to help men wherever I can. That's who I am. So the two main things that I think people seek you out for is your content on masculinity and also localism.

01:22

You're very much about county poor country, being an impact where you are, planting their building, watering that.

01:31

And really, I think the first time I heard about you wasn't through the book, but it was through the It's Good to Be a

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Man podcast that you had with Dominic Nontenant. That's right. So I first heard about you there and I started listening to this content, and there was a lot of insightful things.

01:45

And I'm sure that you've been sought by young men a plenty over the past several years.

01:52

So as they're reaching out to you, as you're accumulating their attention, if you will, and listening to their struggles and going on about this, what inspired you guys to write the book?

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And what were you hoping would be the big takeaway for young men? So I started

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It's Good to Be a Man, I think in 2018, somewhere around there. And it started as like a

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Facebook page and I was gonna do a podcast. And then Nontenant was thinking through some of the same issues, like these young guys were listening to Jordan Peterson, pickup artists, the

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Man is Fierce stuff, which is kind of like over to some degree, it kind of died with Andrew Tate.

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I think Andrew Tate took it to crazy levels and people - Nobody wanted anymore him.

02:38

No, no. But that stuff was like, we were kind of cutting edge at the time, interacting with it.

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We were interacting with it because it was affecting how young men thought. And we're like, why are they going to these pagans?

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Why are they going to pickup artists? What's this all about? And then as I started, back then

02:54

I used to buy old comic book stores and flip, I'd go in, buy out all their content and flip it online through Amazon and eBay and all this.

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So I had like hundreds of thousands of comics that I'd sit down in my warehouse, pack up my comics to send in and listen to hours of this stuff, trying to wrap my mind around it.

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So as I listened to that, I was like, okay, it's practical. It's a little more honest about male and female nature, especially unregenerate male and female nature.

03:26

Okay. And so that started to reframe It's Good to Be a

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Man from what would have been probably like a lot of the other content on sexuality at the time to something a little different.

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And so I was like, I'm going to write a book. I was really blown away by Peter Jones article on androgyny.

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I don't know when I first read that. So a long time ago. But I've been obsessed with androgyny ever since 1999 in my anthropology 101 course, where I had a lesbian feminist professor who looked like a dude who was very intriguing.

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And there's this part in our textbook and it's this big old black bodybuilder.

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And they showed the picture of the black body builder to this African tribe. And the

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African tribe was like, that is a big woman, right? Because he's all like greased up and he's got pectoral muscles.

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They're like, oh, what's going on? And she talked about how industry back then, back in the 20s or whatever, maybe 30s realized that they'd sold as much as they could to women.

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And they started rebranding purses to men and hair gel to men and how there's this kind of been this push towards androgyny.

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Of course, she saw this as probably good to some level. She was a pretty honest academic.

04:48

So she got me turned on to radical feminists. I read them all. Sheila Mythe Firestone is my favorite because she's the most honest.

04:56

That must have been a dark period in your life. Oh, I became patriarchal through reading feminists.

05:03

I didn't come up through complementarian circles. I was a pretty, I've been a believer for about two years when

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I went to college. And as I listened to these women criticize birth, like, so abortion is a big part of it.

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So they're like, Sheila Mythe Firestone's very in a dialectic of sex. She's very straightforward on this stuff.

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She's like, and two women are freed from the household and from the womb, they can never truly be equal.

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So she's like all into ectogenesis. So like basically growing babies.

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She's dead now. Growing babies inside of like a fake womb. So she was like all about, she believed that a woman's body was ultimately like chains, right?

05:47

Shackles. It was the enemy they had to be delivered from. Or they'd never be delivered. Yeah. So that's where I started having this idea about maleness and femaleness being good.

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Reading like Dutch guys, like, grace restores nature. That was happening at the same time. Okay, by Bob Inc. Yeah, that's where I got really introduced to those guys.

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I started with Schaefer and you can kind of trace it back through Schaefer. Then I also read The Puritan Family by Edmund Morgan.

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And he's an atheist, but a very honest scholar of the Puritans. And that's a great book.

06:21

Highly recommend it. It's worth reading. First chapter talks about how the Puritans really looked at family life in the fall and all this through a grid of order disorder, right?

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And things breaking down. So I put together a talk that I did for this EV free youth group that like totally scandalized everybody.

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And that is... Did they ask you back or not? No, no, no, no. But I will say the pastor defended me, even though he's like, well, don't do that to me again.

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But he definitely defended me. That's kind of the first chapter of It's Good to Be a Man. I wrote that years ago.

06:57

So the idea of androgyny, the idea of the body being treated as it's not good, the idea of order and cosmos having structure and seeing the fall as the devil's attack on God's hierarchy.

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All that was like kind of early on in stewing in me. And then with the red pill stuff,

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I was like, I think we're onto something here. And I think we should write a book that is like a detailed theology of male sexuality with emphasis on androgyny.

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So we started this like really crazy project. And then I started talking to men through email, on phones, folks that were like reaching out to me because of the podcast.

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And I started to realize how they're like overthinking everything, how we don't need another sort of academic scholarly book.

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And that's not who I am really. And I can carry my own somewhat, but I'm more of a practitioner.

07:54

Sure. So we started to reframe the book and really focus on getting these guys unstuck, getting them heading the right way, giving them big principles as opposed to...

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I'm more of a principle guy than a rule guy. And that's what a lot of men want. Like, give me steps.

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Give me the blueprint. The blueprint, but that's not wisdom, right? Like they want wisdom is the right, a wise application of knowledge across many different circumstances.

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It's not a detailed step -by -step. That's right. Like here, build this thing. Here's this manual. So that all started to take form. And then

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I saw a non, we used to argue about the Sethite view. Okay. Yeah. Because I'm a huge proponent of the

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Sethite view and not the demon baby view. So we used to, we used to argue about that all the time.

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And so it's, you know, men are, we become friends through fighting. Girls, when they fight, they're never going to be friends again.

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Guys, you bloody a lip and you might be best buds forever. So I read something on his blog and he was like clearly listening to the same stuff.

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And I said, man, I don't want to do this by myself. Why don't you like join this Facebook group with me? And we start working on this.

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So that turned into the podcast. And then that turned into the book. I always thought of it's good to be a man as a project.

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So something with the beginning and end. And so we ended, once we got the book done,

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I ended the last episode, episode 75. My brother had died and he had overdosed and just ran himself into the ground.

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And I wanted it, I ended it with that because guys have grown up broken and fatherless and they can get stuck in the past.

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So much bitterness, they can not be able to see the future. And that's what happened to my brother.

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So I wanted to end with like, hey, with a warning, this could happen, but there is hope, there is.

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If you allow bitterness to consume you. It can. Or resentment. And so take these things, like I think of depression or brokenness like that my brother had as like a valley, right?

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So we had a little, we've had nine kids. So I had a girl, sometimes I say nine, sometimes

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I don't, it confuses people. But I had a daughter, Nysia, who died around her due date, stillbirth, right? Her heart just gave out, we don't know why.

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It was very painful. And when you go through something like that, traumatic, whatever you want to call it, you enter a valley, you go deep down into a valley.

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And sometimes you'll meet people that set up camp at the bottom of that valley, you know, like in their pain, stewing in it.

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And those people will say, oh yeah, let's talk about our pain. Let's talk about how like your dad did wrong or how terrible his baby died.

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But what you have to do, they say Churchill said this, but he didn't. We don't know who, but when you're going through hell, keep going, right?

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You have to push through and you squint your eyes to that little light that's coming over the top of the mountain, of the valley.

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Yeah, on the horizon. And then you push through that. And I, that's what I've been trying to do because we have several decades of generational problems in America.

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Really you got the fifties with guys like Kinsey Institute that led to sexual depravity.

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That stuff really takes root in the sixties, sixties things move really quick. You go, that's where you start moving towards abortion, no fault divorce, the what do you call it?

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Birth control pill. Right, the declension is rapid from that point. Then 20 years from there, you get to the nineties.

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So kids like me in the eighties, boys, we were like being drugged with methylphenidate, which is Ritalin. The school place had turned, shop is disappearing, recess is getting shorter.

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They're building classrooms around more feminine behavior, which is good.

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There's nothing wrong, it's natural, but boys aren't girls, girls aren't boys. They're a little different. You have to build, if you're going to have these education sort of approaches and tactics, they have to figure in both sexes or make a school just for girls and a school just for boys.

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So from the eighties on, man, I mean, when I was a kid, it's still very rare to have many divorced parents in like your second, third grade class.

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Now it's like 50 % of America, they don't know their dad, dad's not around. So It's Good to Be a

12:15

Man was written for what we call bastards, which people think as a cuss word. We did make a mistake in the book.

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So we wrote one version of the book and then we like radically edited it because Canon, Canon told us we needed more editing and we did, but we like totally changed it.

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We moved one chapter from the beginning or from the end to the beginning and we forgot to explain clueless bastards there.

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So if you ever read that book and out of nowhere, we say clueless bastards, that was supposed to be after we had explained it.

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We're not just throwing around cuss words. Yeah, we weren't going for shock value. No, not at all. It's hilarious that people said that, but a bastard is just a illegitimate child that doesn't bear the name of his father.

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A name is like with the name of God is all his attributes, everything. The name is like your brand, your reputation, who you are.

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So a bastard doesn't carry his father's name. He doesn't get all of his father given to him. That's a pain.

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And when people like, or are you insulting them by calling them bastards? They feel like it. It actually isn't an insult for a lot of guys.

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It is naming a pain, a specter, a cloud that hangs over top of them.

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And I don't have my dad the way I wanted to. So we wanted to write a book that's practical, that engages in these big issues and helps other clueless bastards, men that weren't taught how to tie a tie, how to shake hands, how to look a woman in the eye and all that.

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And guys that can get it done. I always think about Red Green, the comedian, like if they can't find, if they don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy.

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Men are measured by our ability to get things done. We wanted something that got them unstuck and got them moving.

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And I think we accomplished it for the most part. Every time you write a book, you go back and say, yeah, I do that differently or whatever.

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And our goal was to create something timely, not timeless. We don't think we're, I don't think

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I'm the next Calvin or anything like that. I hear people say that. I'm like, good luck, buddy. I can write something that can help these guys.

14:17

So that's kind of the genesis of the project. It was a good project. It's been a blessing to help a lot of guys, a lot herd of men out there.

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A lot of opportunities, I think. Men don't need much, right?

14:32

You praise a guy. It's like, I was a wrestler, big time wrestler. And both my boys, two of my boys are wrestlers.

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And you know, your coaches don't actually praise you that much. Like you're screwing this up and go run suicides and don't slam down your headgear and do all that.

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And I remember this one time, my first year wrestling, I got moved up to varsity and I wrestled the state champion of the second,

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I think he came in second in state, right? He didn't pin me in the first period. He did pin me in the second, but I like him to run for his money in the first period.

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And I was just like going crazy. I came off and Donnie Stonefield was his name, was my coach that year.

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And Donnie said, Foster, you can wrestle for me whenever you want. It just meant the world to me.

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Like I had just lost and he said he was blown away by the effort and encouraged by it.

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A lot of guys just need someone to say, I love you, or you're doing a good job. Yes, you screwed up, but you can do that.

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That's what men need. They need kick in the butt, but also praise.

15:37

Not just be a man. Yeah, yeah. Like man up is not helpful to someone that doesn't know what it means to be a man.

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Man up, man up. Like, how do I man up? Okay, what does that look like? Yeah, and so I think the boomer pastors mean well, but they grew up before a tsunami washed away a lot of cultural memory.

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There's like, I remember I shook this guy's hand, Gary Knopper. He was my youth pastor's husband.

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I had a woman youth pastor when I first got saved. So I ran into him at Kroger where I was working as a guy that like bagged and got the cards.

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And I shook his hand, I did the like dead fish, you know? And Gary's like, son, son, that's not how you shake hand, never do that again.

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Here's how you shake it. I was like, oh, I never shook a hand that way ever again, you know? I remember squeezing an old woman's hand too hard and like, no, don't do that either.

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But there was like, there was fathers, there was uncles, there was a cultural knowledge that slipped away more and more and more.

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There's a way that boomers grew up that was good and put them ahead. And some of these guys just have gone on with their life, they have their own responsibilities or whatever, they're maturing too.

16:51

I'm 44, I still feel 16. I'm sure boomers that are 60 still feel 20. They don't know that the world changed, some of them don't, but it has, it has changed.

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And some of these guys need really simple practical advice, right?

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They just need like a few things. And if you're telling them a man up, that made sense in a world that knew what it meant to be a man.

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In a world where a dude can be a chick because he feels that or a chick can be a dude or, you know, that's the world we live in.

17:23

That's something you point out too is the change hasn't been necessarily overt or all at once. No. It's been a subtle degradation.

17:31

Yes. It's like a tsunami. That's the picture I like. I got really obsessed with the Boxing Day tsunami, like in the early days of YouTube and break .com,

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because it's the first time we like had lots of handheld video cameras inability to upload to the internet.

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So, there's more videos of that tsunami than there's ever been of any other tsunami really. And so, but it comes in and it knocks everything over, destroy stuff.

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And then it goes back out. And when it goes back out, it rips away large volumes of soil and dirt and all that.

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So, it pulls with it. It does. And then it comes back in, it goes back out and it comes back in, it goes back out to things fall and settle.

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So, you got different waves of feminism. You've got the state playing the role of dad.

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You've got the welfare state, more or less. You've got methylphenidate, the feminization of all education.

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You've got the death of the mainline church and the rise of churches that don't have like a lot of authority or structure in them.

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You get all these waves. Society got radically redrawn in the last 100 years, especially, last 50, even more so.

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And we live in a world that's pretty chaotic. And I'm really hopeful right now, with this election,

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I don't think Trump's the savior or anything like that, but it's nice. Like, I don't have to worry about getting canceled online because of guys like Elon.

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I don't know how long he's for us, but while he is, it's a chance for us to start rebuilding healthy churches, healthy homes.

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And we like to say, as the father goes, so goes the household. As the household goes, so goes society. So, it starts with getting men to be strong, growing into godly fathers, starting those homes.

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And a church is about as healthy as its households. And then as you have healthy churches, it bleeds out into all society as salt and light.

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And so, that's what we need. Like, with the fight against abortion, we need men to step up.

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Women aren't as scary as men when they... Women will wear some of these guys out.

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And I'm thankful for them. We need mothers in Israel. But men showing up and just at different council meetings, at the state house, all that stuff makes that impact.

20:03

Yeah. I'd love to talk to you a little bit more about that. You pointed out the solution, I think, in all of this, though, is really, if we think about churches needing to be restored, society needing to be restored, and then what is a church?

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Well, its primary building block is a collection of households. Households are headed by fathers.

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So, in order to restore healthy households with healthy churches, you have to restore healthy fathers, which means you have to have a healthy vision of manhood on masculinity restored.

20:29

But this is precisely what's been under attack, as you're pointing out. So, you say in the book...

20:34

I want to bring two thoughts together here. Patriarchy is unavoidable.

20:40

Now, I want to ask you briefly, how so? And then two, it seems like what you're saying, and this is something that you've said elsewhere, it's not so much a war between the sexes, like men and women at each other's throats vying for these power grabs.

20:55

We need to understand the origin of this. You're talking about reading all these feminists. It's a war on sex itself, ontologically speaking.

21:03

Can you bring those two together? Sure. So, the idea that patriarchy is inevitable, which is the first line of the book, came from Steven Goldberg's book that got...

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It was originally titled Patriarchy is Inevitable, and it was retitled Why Men Rule.

21:19

It's Father Rule. Why Patriarchy is Father Rule. So, Steven Goldberg's Anthropologist, the book, crazily, is endorsed by Margaret Mead, who's a feminist and really the mother of anthropology.

21:31

Oh, all right. Yeah. And it's because Goldberg shows that their patriarchy is all we have in history.

21:38

There's never been a matriarchy. There's matrilineal cultures where you track certain aspects of inheritance rights or whatever through the women, but in terms of the top leadership positions, it's always men.

21:50

Still is, even in America. Presidents, chairman of the board, heads of corporations.

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It's like 95 % or something. It's like really high. And I think it's hilarious that Trump is responsible for stopping the first woman president twice.

22:07

That's a little side note, but that's ironic. Anyway... Yeah. But a worthy one to point out. Yeah. So, the reason it's inevitable, it's part of nature, and you can't stop

22:19

God's design. It's built into this place. Yeah. So, it's like, how long does a gay... If everyone was gay, let's say we're all gay, and there's no technology.

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It's a one generation society. It all falls apart because you don't have any children. So, you can't go against nature too long.

22:35

You can only mess with... Part of the problem with the hormonal birth control, it screws with people.

22:41

When you try to control nature, there's consequences. So, patriarchy is inevitable. It's going to happen one way or another.

22:47

The question is, will it be good or bad patriarchy? God is a father. God is the father. That's not a metaphor we put on God.

22:54

God is the father from which all fatherhood gets its name. This is how he reveals himself. That's right. Yep. And so, the devil, though, is a father of sorts.

23:02

He's a father of lies. And that's how Jesus speaks of him. You are sons of the devil, right?

23:09

So, the idea of being a son of God is meaning that you reflect his nature. Being the son of the devil, you reflect his nature.

23:16

So, that's spiritual patriarchy, but you also have bad patriarchs like Pharaoh versus a good patriarch like Moses, right?

23:23

So, Pharaoh wants to control the young men for his own glory, his own good, as opposed to, say, a pastor or father.

23:32

My goal as a father is to raise my sons and my daughters into peers. I don't want to...

23:39

I want to be amazed one day by how wise my son has grown to be and how good of a daddy he is.

23:45

So, you're raising them up. That's what a father does. And Pharaoh's attacking... Attacking the young men, pacify them.

23:51

And he's using infanticide. Yeah, killing them. Yeah. That's always... And there's always a connection. So, like even in America, from a legal standpoint, it's not patriarchal, but from who controls things, it is at the top.

24:08

And those guys like to use women against men, because women at the middle level tend to be a little more compliant than guys.

24:15

That's probably because we've got testosterone. We're just much more competitive. Jordan Peterson's explained why guys get paid more.

24:23

Part of it is that they just ask, they're more aggressive. But, you know, you've got the devil using Eve against Adam.

24:29

You've got the Philistines using Delilah against Samson. You've got

24:35

Pharaoh using the Hebrew midwives against, trying to at least.

24:41

So, that's an example of women being moral and godly, right? Point is, is that the devil likes to turn the sexes against each other, right?

24:51

He's always doing that. They're playing them against each other because that leads to chaos. The devil is ultimately an agent of chaos where God is a

24:58

God of order. So, like, you know, like Joker from the

25:03

Dark Knights, agent of chaos. He's like the shark from Jaws. Preeminent anarchist.

25:09

Pops in, pops out, right? Whatever. Causes chaos and then leaves. And that's what you kind of see with the devil. He pops in here.

25:15

He tempts Jesus for a while, leaves until he has a good time to do it again. So, but he likes to turn the sexes on each other because if we're united, we start to produce stable households and children and culture and churches and yada, yada, yada.

25:30

So, if you can break that all down, you can get the sexes to fight with each other. And the sexes compliment and complete each other in the sense of mission, right?

25:39

So, God gives us this mission. We'll refer to that sometimes as like the creation. The dominion mandate. Dominion, cultural mandate, whatever.

25:45

They're all the same thing. It's a creation that is part of the perfect world. So, it's something that's not cultural in the sense that it is over and is going to be part of this creation until God creates a new creation, right?

26:01

It's cultural in that it produces culture. We make stuff. It's dominion that we control things.

26:08

At the heart of that though is be fruitful and multiply. And at the heart of that is it's not good for a man to be alone.

26:14

And I'll bring in my helpmate and they're joined together in one flesh. That's marriage. So, marriages produce children.

26:21

Children in marriages produce culture. And a household biblically is not just like there's a difference between a house and a home, right?

26:31

So, when you stay at an Airbnb, you're staying at a house, right? And it's always like a little generic.

26:37

I'm at an Airbnb. But at your home, it's lived in. It's you. It's pictures of your family.

26:43

It's your style and all that stuff. It's a culture. It's an atmosphere. It's a feeling. So, households is the everything of your family.

26:51

It's the byproduct of covenantal love together. It's the children. It's the properties, influence.

26:58

It's your reputation, your name. It's all of that. So, God, the creation mandate is realized through the joining of a man and woman to produce households.

27:11

So, that's why Satan hates sex. He hates sex. It's not that he loves it. No. As many people wrongly suppose.

27:18

Like, oh, Satan loves sex. He likes sex outside of marriage because the same reason an arsonist loves fire outside of fireplaces, right?

27:27

So, fire... He can weaponize it. Yeah. Good things twisted are super destructive.

27:33

Yes. Right. One of the most destructive things in the world is a bad dad or a bad pastor, right? Because they're very powerful.

27:40

Tons of influence, tons of power, and that can be just very destructive, right?

27:45

It's one of the most beautiful things is a godly present father, a godly disciplined shepherd, all those things.

27:55

So, the devil wants to take fire out of the fireplace, out of the engine chamber and bring it out into the world and burn it down.

28:03

So, guys that have... You see this with like Augustine and Christostom and some of these early church fathers who just had a really low view of sex.

28:13

With Augustine, I think it's certainly connected to him taking a concubine and all that prior to his conversion and this the guilt.

28:22

So, those that have been singed by the fire of lust are scared of fire.

28:29

And so, I think when you look at some of the early church, a lot of their views of sex is a little messed up, but that was a very hedonistic time.

28:36

Yeah. They were reacting to that probably. And we have the problem again, because pornography is everywhere. When I was a kid, you wanted to get porn, you got to...

28:43

It's like in between your dad's mattress, your uncle's mattress or a VHS tap. Now it's just your phone, right?

28:49

It's easy to get there on accident. You can't not carry the fire close to your chest, lest you be burned.

28:55

And that's what... It's very easy to carry the fire next to your chest. 100%. And we are dealing with nine -year -olds and 10 -year -olds that grew up seeing this stuff.

29:01

We have a lot of people for the first time that they're sexually intimate, there's choking happening, because they think that's normal, right?

29:09

That's just what they've seen. That's what they've seen. It's like, that's not normal. That's not good.

29:15

They think BDSM is normal. That's not good either. That's a product of growing up in... So, we are in an age that's not unlike before the church really took hold in the

29:28

West, or it was renewed through the Reformation. We're in a very...

29:34

You got stuff like MGTOW, men going their own way. We're not going to get married. It's bad. You got women.

29:40

I mean, women... This is hard for older pastors to realize. The women today are very scandalous in their online behavior.

29:47

Not all of them, but we're so used to say guys today are losers, right? Suddenly it's okay to speak in genealogies about guys, but not about women.

29:57

I think porn has ruined men. I think social media has ruined women, because you can...

30:06

You have someone that's like grossly obese and not healthy, and she'll post pictures on Instagram and have a ton of guys tell her that she's beautiful.

30:16

Now, I'm sure she's beautiful in some ways and all that, but health is a beautiful thing.

30:22

We should pursue it. We all have our own struggles, whatever. But now women are being flattered and told that they're great no matter what with the body positivity movement.

30:33

What matters there is that flattery inflates people, right?

30:39

Big time. The sense of self -worth and so on. And just like also guys, you're supposed to work to get sex, right?

30:47

Yeah. This is a glory that's won. Yes. And so now we have social media and pornography. Social media is bad for a certain type of guy.

30:53

We see guys online with always worrying and can't get along with anybody, especially -

30:59

Yeah, contentious. Reformed guys. Just a few, just a few. Yeah. Well, I've gotten in trouble for speaking to them as autistic, but they say autism is the male brain on steroids, is what

31:14

I've read. And I think they're guys that lack social cues.

31:21

They're socially obtuse. And that's because that stuff is learned in the context of the family. So you take -

31:27

So they're showing their hand a bit about where they come from. They're broken. They're broken and they're very mechanistic and mechanical and even red pill, blue pill, white pill, black pill, everything's super categorized.

31:38

And it's like you're coding or like you can engineer like sexuality.

31:44

Sexuality is much more organic in the way it works. Even what's male and female or masculine and feminine, there is like a zone that is shared by the sex.

31:58

Androgyny though, is where you make the sexes interchangeable or you so mix them that there's no distinctions.

32:07

Which we're seeing everywhere right now. And it's taken, of course, it's more subtle forms and then it's more overt forms as well, whereas this is what we're after.

32:17

We want to completely flatten all together. And David Bowie is like one of the famous guys to kind of push forward androgyny.

32:23

Another one is the woman Tilda Swinton, who plays, she kind of looks like David Bowie actually, but she plays a white witch, but she is in the

32:33

Constantine movie, I think. Oceana Reeves. Yeah. I think she is. And she plays like Gabriel or Michael, the angel.

32:41

And she's very like, yeah, she's kind of looks like a dude, kind of doesn't.

32:47

Yeah, you can't tell, you're unsure. It's unsettling. Because you can't tell. And that's like, well,

32:52

I'll say simple things that'll like drive people nuts. Like men make bad moms, moms make bad dads.

32:58

Like, whoa, so you're saying it's bad to be a single parent. Well, first off, yes. Every single parent feels that way.

33:05

Every mom, that's a single mom wishes that she had a godly father in the lives of her children.

33:10

Every single dad wished he had a godly mother in the life. So it's bad in that it's difficult and it's against, it's not what's supposed to happen.

33:19

And does that mean single parents don't give it their all? Of course they do. But women can't make up for the lack of a father.

33:28

A father can't make up for a lack of a mother. This is part of God's design. And that doesn't mean that God can't work in spite of that.

33:35

Certainly that's part of what we know about regeneration. Born again, we have new desires.

33:41

We can leave those things in the past, such were some of you. But there's a normative expression.

33:47

Yes. And a telos for which men and women were created. And it's the natural family and the spiritual family.

33:53

And the best chapter to make this super clear that they're distinct but overlapping is 1

33:58

Timothy 5, where a guy that doesn't provide for his own family is worse than an unbeliever.

34:05

The context of that is a husband and wife providing for their in -laws. So it has in view the extended family.

34:13

And the reason that's coming up is the church that Timothy was in, probably Ephesus, was having issues with widows who weren't really widows.

34:21

In other words, they could still get married or they had family that could take care of them. And the church is like, look, we're totally willing to take care of these people, but here's what these women need to be.

34:30

And if they're not that, we're not going to take care of them. They should just get married or they're kids. So what you're seeing, the church has responsibilities to these women, but also the family, the natural family has responsibilities to them first.

34:42

So they're overlapping, they're interacting, but they're not the same. So a pastor is father -like, a father is pastoral, but they're distinct, right?

34:53

Right. So - They have a realm of authority. They do. They have a sphere of authority. And they interact, but they're not identical.

34:58

And right now it's like, I was on Cultish the other day, and I really think we're entering a new age of cults.

35:06

And I think the lack of fathers set people up for cults. And they'll take different forms, whether it's like CrossFit or these online groups.

35:15

I'm not saying all CrossFits are cult, but it can be. And CrossFit, like a certain little group can have control in a way that's not good.

35:26

Same way online, some of these churches very much act like cults in this sort of control.

35:32

And that's because people are drawn to that because they want a shared identity. They want a dad, they want approval.

35:38

They want to belong. They want a tradition. A sense of fraternity. Yep. All that stuff. Right. You have a team around you.

35:43

Yep. 100%. You have brothers, all that. So part of like our challenge in an age of androgyny, in an age of broken families is recovering fatherhood as it extends across all these different realms of authority, spheres of authority, and also creating the proper limitations.

36:05

Like I'm not ashamed of my fatherly authority or my pastoral authority. I will use it and not apologize, but it has limitations.

36:13

And good dads know when like part like when your kids are little, you tell them what to do and they do it.

36:19

Right. It's Ephesians, obey your mom and dad. Right. Do that. As they get older, it's,

36:25

I always tell people it's like sledding, where it's like, when you're going down a hill, you don't have a steering wheel in most slides.

36:30

You kind of like lean. Yeah. And as you - Hope for the best. Yeah. Yeah. You'll know like, oh, so with your, your, your sons and daughters, as they move through the, especially their later teens, you're raising them into adults.

36:42

And part of that is maintaining proper boundaries. You know, like there's a difference.

36:49

Like what, for example, is like, I got a little girl, if she runs through the house naked, when she's like two years old, she's a two year old, whatever.

36:55

It's like, no big deal. But as she moves like up that she's, it's darling, this is not, this is not modest.

37:02

It's not proper. As you're raising kids, you're establishing lots of boundaries like that. Yeah. People that grew up without proper boundaries are, are very vulnerable to manipulation.

37:13

Right. And so this is a problem, you know, like how do we recover authority?

37:18

One way to think about authority is to think about electricity or not electricity, energy. Like energy is neither created nor destroyed.

37:24

It just changes states. So God is the only absolute authority there is.

37:30

There is no other absolute authority, only God. All authority is given by God for a purpose. It's delegated authority.

37:36

God delegates authority to really three main institutions, right?

37:43

The family, the state, the church. I would argue that the state's pre -fall too. Some people would disagree, but it doesn't really matter.

37:49

It's all delegated authority. And that authority is delegated for a particular purpose, right? If one of those institutions fails to exercise authority in an area, another institution can gobble it up.

38:01

So for example, let's say a dad abdicates a family and he's not there. I don't know.

38:07

It's just, he just ditches them or something. And he's got a son that is getting into trouble and steals a dirt bike or whatever.

38:16

And now the state's got to get involved. States, you know, and then they can take some authority that rightly belongs to the household, but now the state becomes a nanny state.

38:26

So one reason tyrants hate patriarchy, especially when it's distributed patriarchy through heads of households, men stepping up, is it's a check on their authority, right?

38:39

So, or if the church doesn't exercise authority, they don't like excommunicate that boy or put them through some point of some type of church discipline, then the family maybe steps in or whatever, but that authority is going to go somewhere.

38:52

The problem that we've really had in America for quite some time is the authorities almost all gone to the state.

38:58

So one reason like guys like me get excited about Trump coming into power is like doge the department of government.

39:06

Well, I like that. I like any removing their hands from our life where they're exercising authority is not

39:13

God -given is a good thing. Now we have to take that back. And so we have this very difficult task that's fallen to this generation, which is restoring fatherhood, restoring institutions, restoring boundaries.

39:31

It's gonna be messy. It's gonna be hard. Just like anytime you're learning how to do something. So that's it.

39:38

That's like abortion disappears if all the men just rise up.

39:44

Amen. And that's been our feeling too about this. I mean, we've been involved in this for years now, fighting on multiple fronts outside the clinics, the legislative aspect of it, but equally as important to those things is undermining the culture that nourishes abortion.

40:00

That's right. So there's a fatherly, there's a paternal abdication involved in all of these various areas in the home, in the church, and I'd even argue in the state too.

40:10

It's men failing to do and say what needs to be done and said in order to end abortion.

40:18

And I don't just mean end it legally, which we want. We want baby murder outlawed. We want all life protected under the law.

40:24

That's what we're aiming at here. But we need to also... You mentioned men ruling over themselves, ruling their homes, pastors ruling over their churches, preaching against this, which many times is just not done.

40:39

There's a lot of fear. There's a lot of trepidation going on there too. I wanted to maybe just throw something out at you here.

40:46

You keep hammering away on the androgynous aspects here. And in the book, you talk about Romans 1, how really these physical manifestations of throwing off our gender roles, our sex roles, are really just a spiritual manifestation of us rejecting the creator -creature distinction.

41:04

Yes. Right? So Romans 1, we all know it. We don't want God in our knowledge. We exchange the truth for the lie.

41:10

We worship the creature rather than the creator. And then that has physical manifestations. That spiritual rebellion actually looks like something in the world, and it looks like throwing off that telos for which we were created.

41:23

And I can't think of anything that does that maybe in a more fundamental manner than taking something that is within the woman that is meant to create life, nurture life, grow life, and ultimately care for life once birth has taken place.

41:42

But I can't think of anything more fundamentally destructive towards that telos and something that is more androgynous.

41:51

Right? Because you're taking those distinctions that are good and godly, and that God built into the fabric of the cosmos.

41:57

And you're saying, no, we will not be fruitful. We will not do what women were created to do.

42:04

That's right. We want to be like men in this way. And so, as I'm reading the book here, again, last night,

42:10

I'm listening to it. I'm like, oh my goodness, this is a totally pagan mindset. This is ritualized, sacramental androgyny.

42:20

You read things like I read yesterday, J .K. Rowling made a statement on Twitter. She's gotten cool, man.

42:26

She's an incredible advocate for, you know, we don't want men in women's spaces and women's courts and so on and so forth.

42:32

And then she's like, but I'm fighting for the right for a woman to have an abortion. She's kind of an old school feminist.

42:38

Right. So, I'm thinking to myself, like, well, hang on a second. If we're gonna be consistent here, then we have to understand that sex, we need to have a high view of it, not only in the locker room, but in the bedroom.

42:50

It's dangerous. Right? It will create people that will live forever. It's part of the dominion mandate.

42:56

It creates worshipers of God. So, that makes it part and parcel to the plan of God for salvation.

43:01

It's what he's doing in the world and among the nations. And abortion is such a fundamental attack on the family, on marriage, on life, on children, that,

43:11

I mean, this is spiritual. Would you agree that this is fundamentally a religious conflict?

43:16

Abortion can't be fought like, oh, no, let me just give you some biological proofs here that this is a human. It's gotta be much deeper and say, no, this is a moral, spiritual problem of fallen hearts.

43:28

I think what abortion does, it ties together several very massive forms of rebellion.

43:34

Number one, it is the violent elimination of the image of God from the world.

43:41

Right? So, after the flood, we still see that man bears the image of God because you can't shed a man's blood without your blood being shed because he bears the image of God.

43:55

So, in abortion, you are destroying the human life that is an image bearer. And part of what's so glorious about humans is we're made in the image of God.

44:03

Secondly, it's a rebellion against your body, right? You're saying your body's not your reality and you have no commitment to what's inside of you.

44:13

Third, it is a rebellion against the proper design of the family, of motherhood, of fatherhood.

44:20

So, in it, you have the violent elimination of the image of God. You have the rebellion against your body is destiny, body is reality.

44:31

And then also the tossing off of God's order in the world, right?

44:37

I was thinking about something you just said. And you can appeal, this is like, even with non -Christians.

44:42

I remember I was at Greenville Women's Clinic down in Greenville. It's an abortion clinic.

44:48

And so, we used to go down there with three guys signs when I was a pastor in South Carolina.

44:54

Remember this black fella comes in, drops someone off, goes out.

45:01

And on the way out, he stops to talk to me. Rarely could you get them to stop. He's like, oh,

45:06

I'm just dropping her off for prenatal. I was like, no, no, you're not. No, you're not. I said, look, you should go back in there right now.

45:13

He's, oh, I don't know, man. I said, have you seen the movie Taken? And he said, yes.

45:18

I said, it's Liam Neeson, daughter kidnapped. I'm going to come.

45:25

Taking a set of skills. I got skills. I'm going to find and kill you. He's like, right. So, Liam Neeson's a hero.

45:31

You agree? And the gentleman says, sure. I said, I want you to understand, like, you are a father to a kid.

45:39

Yeah. And you're not going to go in there and save her. You are not the hero. You are the bad guy.

45:44

Every time you watch Taken or any other movie where a father steps up and do it.

45:50

So, I was just taking away from it. I remember this moment. And I said, he cheered up and he came back.

45:56

I don't know if they got out or not. Who knows what happened? I'm not sure. But this stuff is so built into us.

46:02

You can't hide from it. Like nature is inevitable and God will redeem nature.

46:08

It's inevitable. Like, but it's part of who we are. It works itself out. Like, I think we might look back on like 2012 to about now and be like, those were the retarded times.

46:23

Like, I don't know if we're allowed to say that on Apology Studios. Well, we are now. Yeah. But it's a new day.

46:31

New day is dawning. But it was crazy. Yeah. It's been crazy.

46:36

When I went to university, I graduated from NKU back in the early 2000s,

46:42

Northern Kentucky University. They say it's the Harvard of Northern Kentucky. The Harvard of Northern Kentucky. Not really.

46:49

But it was still about Veritas, about truth and question authority.

46:55

And then just a few years later, it's like, words are violence. Don't make us question anything.

47:01

Right. Things got really crazy. And now I don't,

47:06

I kind of see this current administration as the beginning of a sort of conservative paganism is what

47:12

I suspect will happen. I think that's fair. Yeah. I think I know a lot of people didn't vote for Trump because of how soft, the

47:20

Republican party has been not, it's been changed forever. Yes. And it's not going to...

47:26

They basically gutted it of its pro -life, is never abolitionist to begin with, but even from pro -life.

47:38

But one reason they've come back into power is everyone pushed it too far. And everyone's like, this is insanity.

47:43

Yeah. Right. And that's because nature is like that. You can only rebel for so long until there's consequences.

47:51

Yeah. You can't go against... Well, you could maybe inside of you, it messes a woman up forever.

47:58

It could physically mess her up, certainly messes her up psychologically. A man who goes along with the destruction of his own child, he's never the same again.

48:06

You can't rebel against nature without there being consequences. Yeah. The creation strikes back.

48:12

What has happened with like transgender surgeries, like it is vile and gut -wrenching to read what it does to people and just...

48:21

Irrevocable damage. Can't even talk and like... Well, they'll say, if I follow my feelings,

48:29

I will be happy. And then they're more suicidal after the post -op than they are pre -op.

48:35

What a putrid philosophy. Yeah. Disgusting. This is all gets back to this issue of...

48:41

Now, so sin is not just wrong, it's bad. It's wrong in that it goes against God's truth.

48:47

It's bad in that it goes against God's design. And with that, sin is its own punishment to some degree.

48:52

It's its own... It carries with it a particular curse. Yeah, a power. Yes. A power in the real world. And righteousness is not just true, it's good.

49:03

So right... One example of this would be the fifth commandment, honor your father and mother. It's the first commandment with promise that your life may be long, right?

49:11

So we know that righteousness prolongs a person's life that could be quantitatively or qualitatively.

49:17

Right. Quantitatively, like years. Perhaps one of the reasons we see that the Sethite line lives such long lives is because they are following God and part of...

49:27

It's a way to demonstrate a blessing on them, right? Certainly true of the patriarchs, they live to be...

49:33

Even Jacob to be 145 years old. But it certainly is quantitative or qualitatively, it's a better, fuller life.

49:41

When you follow God's design, blessings come with it. You're still in a fallen world, it's not perfect, but...

49:49

But obedience does... Yes. Bring blessing, normatively. Think of it this way, like women...

49:55

One of the things that a father or a good husband gives a good wife is that, I help make big decisions for my family so my wife can focus on decisions because she is with kids all day long while I'm working.

50:10

Yep, for real. And she's got a thousand decisions she's making. There's a sort of decision fatigue. Yeah. So when male headship is done in a godly way,

50:20

I come in and alleviate my wife from having to be the decisive one all the time. There's nothing more frustrating than a woman, than a man who is passive and won't take action.

50:31

She may not be able to put that into words, but you can see it in their lives. A lot of anxious women are just because they're with men that just won't decide or do something.

50:41

You know? Make a decision. It could also be they don't follow the man, right? It could be that they have their own problems.

50:47

I'm not saying it's always a guy, but I am saying that when a man accepts headship into his life, like I might not be to blame for everything in my household, but I am responsible.

50:56

Right. There's different things. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm responsible for all my kids, for my wife, they're their own moral agents, they make their own decisions.

51:02

So I might not be to blame for the particular actions they took, but I am responsible. Once I accept responsibility and God has created authority and responsibility in such a way that they tend to travel in parity.

51:15

So if you get more authority, you get more responsibility. If you give someone more responsibility, you should give them more authority, right?

51:21

And those things should travel together. And that's why anytime you step up in leadership, it's not just for benefits.

51:29

The benefit is the work. The benefit is not just the perks. You do get some perks, whatever, but I don't know, as someone who's moved up in leadership in a lot of different areas, sometimes like, eh, maybe it had been better to be a foot soldier than to be the captain.

51:44

But the point I'm making here though, is that as you obey God, good things come from it.

51:51

As you submit to your sexual reality, I am a man, I am a woman.

51:57

As you work through it, according to not just design and nature, which shows us a lot, but also the special revelation of scripture, as you work that out in your life, you have more peace, more shalom in your marriage, in your home, and that trickles out into all of society.

52:17

And so one way we bring peace, this is like, we should get involved in politics. We should be involved in that process, but that works alongside with the preaching of the gospel, with the establishment of homes.

52:32

If we want peace, because a lot of times power can bring quiet, but it can't bring peace.

52:38

So in the example I would always give is when you're, I've been around quiet dinner tables with my wife without any peace.

52:47

There's some uneasiness. There's a lot going on under the surface. Conflict underneath the surface. Right. But so we have to pursue those things, but getting men to take responsibility for themselves to the extent that they can be responsible for more people.

53:01

So they're creating a surplus of responsibility, creating a surplus of not just resources, but of leadership.

53:10

Now I can take on, because that's how it starts. First you get a woman, somehow you convince her like, oh, yeah.

53:15

Take a shot on me. Let's do this. You get kids and you take that and then you work your way up in the business world.

53:21

You work your way up in the church. As a guy is taking responsibility for himself, he magnifies it out.

53:28

And it's almost like we create a gravitational zone where everyone's like pulled into us. Because everyone's looking.

53:34

Concept of gravitas. Oh, I love it. Yeah. It was crazy. Like we're thinking about how to describe what a man should become.

53:42

And a man has a weight to him, right? He pulls people into his orbit. He does. And a lot of guys that desire leadership just lack gravitas.

53:49

And how do you get gravitas? Well, you throw yourself into life, right? That's the hard part. You applaud.

53:55

You applaud. You know, you don't become, how'd you get so wise? I've stepped on a lot of nails, a lot of landmines.

54:02

I've made a lot of mistakes. I've lived a lot of lives. I've watched a lot of other people do things, you know, wisdom.

54:09

Sometimes you get wisdom just from the gift of the spirit, through studying the word.

54:14

But a lot of times it's through living life, you know, and there's a reason. Pain and suffering and.

54:20

Yeah. Young men can be stupid. And right now online, you can't tell them, hey, you're being a young, oh, you're a boomer.

54:26

First off, I'm Gen X, right? Like if we care. Got me confused with the wrong one. Yeah. So I'm not a boomer.

54:32

I got the same struggles with, it was like real generational. I got the same struggles as you, but you know, this isn't generational.

54:37

You're just a loser. You're just a loser that can't take correction and.

54:43

Scoffer, if you will. Yes. And what men need is a willingness to take correction and you read

54:51

Proverbs and my son, give me your heart. Says that like 14 times in like first 16 chapters.

54:57

You can tell what he's focused on. Yeah. Son, be this man. Do not reject my teaching. Do not like receive correction.

55:03

Don't be the fool. And I have not regretted having lots of mentors and pastors in my life that have been willing to tell me no.

55:11

I just think about that with a lot of guys like, man, someone should have told you no a long time ago. And that's the loving, benevolent discipline of a dad.

55:19

No, you may not. I'm not into gentle parenting. I think gentle parenting creates monsters.

55:25

Gentle parenting creates hardened hearts. That's right. You can have soft hearts and thick skin, which is what we should have, especially with our boys.

55:35

But that comes from a dad saying, so you may not do that. You may not talk to your mom that way.

55:41

Yeah. You're not free to behave this way. No. We're Christians. And so learning to take no and tell yourself no is a big part of developing gravitas.

55:51

No, that is wrong. I won't do that. And sometimes God is gracious to send Jiminy the cricket to us in the form of a good brother, in form of a good pastor or whatever.

56:02

So, what I see online a lot of times, I see a lot of unfathered men. And the way they're like, just the little pushback sometimes, everyone saw a pushback.

56:13

They'll get really cranky, like real quick, like, come on. You know, and I think you weren't bullied enough in high school and you didn't have a dad, you know, where that corrected you because you're brittle.

56:29

These guys are brittle a lot of times because they haven't been put on the anvil and you know, just hitting over.

56:37

I know that metaphor well. My father was a farrier growing up. So, I watched him hammer countless horseshoes on the anvil and watched him shape them in the forge and all that.

56:45

Whatever anger we have towards our father, just know that your son will struggle with some of that towards you.

56:56

And perhaps extend some grace for the sake, if not for his sake, for your sake and the sake of your own son in the future, in a willingness to say, like the little boomer stuff blows up all the time and it's overplayed.

57:11

And I've been asked to write an article for a certain news magazine on it. I don't know if I'm gonna do it or not. Okay. But... We'll have to see then.

57:19

We'll see. I'll see how I feel about it. But there are real generational things.

57:26

But man, my dad made mistakes, but I look at my sons and I see everything that's wonderful about me and my wife.

57:35

And a lot of the things are just terrible. And I was saying this to Jeremiah Roberts the other day that we spanked our two sons too much.

57:46

Cause we were like new to parenting. I grew up in a broken home and we were like in a movement at the time that was like, spank them.

57:54

Right. I was like, spank our grandpa, that kid. And then I don't spank the other six kids quite like we did them.

58:02

And one of my sons said, dad, you just don't spank them enough. I said, you know, son, we spank them the right amount now.

58:08

And I'm sorry. We were too harsh on you guys. And we made a mistake and we were following the instruction of others, but it was our decision.

58:17

We did it. And I need you to forgive me. Taking responsibility for it. And so we're going to sit against our kids.

58:25

If you've been sitting against, all right, welcome. Welcome to the party, pal. You're not unique.

58:31

What are you going to do? You're going to have to, at some point, at least extend forgiveness, have it out there.

58:36

So your heart doesn't get bitter and you can stop being a bastard. Right. In the sense of you need to be your own man.

58:43

I want to head towards wrapping this up. There's one thing I want to ask you about too, because I'm just pulling concepts here from your book.

58:52

You know, you use the term white knight. These are the kind of men that go to bat for women, regardless of how awful they're acting or being.

59:03

It's within them to crave that validation, that approval that they didn't get elsewhere and then find it in the praise of women who are just acting all out of sorts.

59:13

I want to tie that concept here to going back to what we see in the church sometimes and pastors, in particular, being afraid to address sins like abortion, sins that are particular to the female nature.

59:27

Of course, there's other parties involved and men abdicating and so on. But I think there's a real...

59:32

Because we want women to know the truth. They can be forgiven. Right. They can know Christ. They can have his blood cover them.

59:39

They can experience what it means to be reconciled to God. They can have peace with God and his blood can cover the sin of murdering their own children.

59:48

That's the freedom that we offer in Christ. But when we say, don't worry, sweetheart, you just didn't know what you were doing or you had a lot of external voices chirping in you.

01:00:00

We don't want to push the envelope because, number one, we don't want to offend anyone. We don't want the backlash coming from over here.

01:00:07

That's the church side of it. But I see it too, and we do a lot in the broader pro -life world.

01:00:13

Sure you do. All of these pro -life organizations, maybe not every single one, are all run and headed by women.

01:00:21

Because there is a tendency to believe, and we're just giving the pro -choice side this objection on a silver platter.

01:00:27

They say, you don't have a vagina, so you can't talk about abortion. Yeah. Watch me. We're giving that to them by saying, you know what?

01:00:35

I think it would be better for a female to bring this bill to the legislature.

01:00:41

I think it would be better for a woman to speak to this issue. We don't realize, I think, that in deferring, we are abdicating our authority and, quite frankly, what our culture needs, which is strong, godly, masculine leadership to actually end abortion.

01:01:01

It's got to come from us, because we have to be willing to say the hard truth, and we have to be willing to call out sin in our own camps, lust in our churches, fornication, all of these things that are taking our people, that are ensnaring them.

01:01:16

But also, we have to be willing to... We've had pro -life organizations say, you know what? Gosh, I wish you guys would just...

01:01:22

You guys lead this. Yeah, yeah. They're women. They're saying, please, just lead this, because we don't know what to do. Yeah. I mean, we need that.

01:01:28

They want male leadership. Yeah. Well, it's kind of interesting, and it's good to be a man. There was one line that we had in there.

01:01:35

I forget exactly how we said it, but it's like, the devil has daughters as well, or something like that. So, Cannon wanted us to take it out, not because it just didn't flow.

01:01:44

They thought of it. No, no. I want that one in there. I don't know where else to put it, but that's where it fits the best.

01:01:50

I'm not moving on that one. So, we left it in there, and it was in a chapter where we just wanted to talk about how there are such things as evil women.

01:01:59

Like, there's evil men, there's evil women. There's the lady folly. There's all that.

01:02:04

Yeah, she's loud. She's loud. She doesn't - Not just with her words. Doesn't just stay at home. She's a brash. Yeah. Yeah.

01:02:09

A brash woman. She's tumultuous, like a storm or whatever. The problem with the White Knights is they just think of women, we call it masculine devils and angelic or feminine angels, masculine.

01:02:22

So, angels used to always be seen as men until really the romantic period. And you have this kind of radical change, post -romantic into America where women now are seen as like closer to God, cleaner.

01:02:36

That's part of the problem with the temperance movement too. They're kind of the redemptive force for wild men. Yeah. And you see this -

01:02:42

They tame them and so on. One thing that I think that goes on with a lot of boomers that I've noticed is when you read some of these books by guys that wrote on boomer, they're kind of boomer guys.

01:02:52

They were like rough dudes. And then they met some woman that helped them clean up and she really did.

01:02:59

She was God's grace to them. But they don't see like God working through her.

01:03:04

It's almost like the feminine is working through her to make him the man he ought to be or whatever.

01:03:11

She's kind of like an instrument. And I was like, so let's not deny this wife is clearly a beautiful... Or some of these guys got a relatively godly woman to sleep with them and they have this deep guilt about it.

01:03:22

And then they end up marrying this... So if you read enough of these books and I do, you're like, well, there's quite a theme developing here.

01:03:30

And I think back then women were, back 60s, 50s, they were a little more...

01:03:39

They cared. They didn't have abortion. They didn't have birth control. So the consequences of sex is they get pregnant and everyone knows.

01:03:47

So they were much more disciplined at some level in those areas as a culture.

01:03:53

And then as that's got lifted, it's had consequences on women.

01:03:59

And these white knights, they just treat women like they don't do anything bad. Anyone that they race to defend them, my lady,

01:04:09

I'm sorry, this guy's doing that to you. There's a lot of nasty dudes out there that just hate women.

01:04:15

That's a real thing. Misogyny is a real thing. But also misandry is a real thing.

01:04:22

Hating men. And androgyny is acting like that both collapsing the sexism together and not willing to hold women accountable.

01:04:33

Women have agency, they make decisions. And so you murdered your baby. It's very unlikely that anyone put a gun to your head and forced you to go in there and hold you down on the table or forced you to take that pill.

01:04:46

I'm sure it's... Statistically speaking. Yeah. Yeah. No, you did this. It's your fault. You have to accept it.

01:04:52

You're not merely a victim. You can be both a victim and victimizer. Sure. Both the same thing exists.

01:04:58

Brainwashing the culture, media, et cetera. But the reason pastors won't do it, and a lot of people won't do it, is that when you scream at a man, he either works harder or screams back.

01:05:08

And so that's why guys scream at dudes. Every guy's had a coach that's the coach is like...

01:05:15

In your face. Like, more. I will do more. I will be tougher. I'm not gay.

01:05:21

But you scream at a woman, it does not go well. And I think these guys, they don't want to rebuke these women because they don't want to put in the work.

01:05:31

And I get it. I get it. It's like, you're about to preach a sermon that's like, it's fire.

01:05:36

It's going to land in some sensitive areas. And now I'm going to get emails or I'm going to have to do more counseling.

01:05:42

You don't want to deal with it. And you just have to be, no, I'm a shepherd. This is my responsibility. And I preached this sermon. I didn't even do this on purpose, but I preached a sermon called

01:05:49

Christian Women's Sin, and it fell on Mother's Day, totally accidental. Oh, that's providential.

01:05:56

Yeah. I like it, right? And so I, it was about the two women that are at odds in the church of Philippi.

01:06:03

You know, I was just talking about how women have sins like gossip that's constantly, men do that, but it's more prevalent in women.

01:06:11

Makes sense. A little more verbose, linguistically superior to men a lot of times or whatever.

01:06:19

So it makes sense that slander, gossip, that sort of sin would be more prevalent in women or at least warned about more.

01:06:27

That's also because guys don't gossip, we fight, right? Like we've got a problem, just going to beat each other up. Women are going to deal with something more indirectly.

01:06:34

And that's why like guys that deal with things through gossip, slander, are effeminate.

01:06:40

They're dealing with it indirectly in a non -masculine way. Because they don't want to do the confrontation.

01:06:45

They don't want to do the confrontation. There's a way to do confrontation in a godly way. So these white night pastors, like they have two things going on.

01:06:53

One is that they think women are angels. At least they act like it. And all the guys are just beating it up on them.

01:06:59

And like, there are women that lead men away. Like there are women that seduce men, right?

01:07:07

They're like, there always has been. Everyone knows that. Yeah, they do that.

01:07:13

And think about all the false rape accusations that we have. And you can't reveal the identity of the accuser, but you can reveal the identity of the accused.

01:07:22

Either it's all or nothing. They both should not be revealed or they both should be revealed.

01:07:28

And so this guy can have his entire life destroyed. And they believe all women, believe all women.

01:07:34

It's like, that's part of the problem with the Harvey Weinstein thing is it was a mixed bag. A lot of these people are lying about some of this stuff.

01:07:40

And a lot of it happened. Hollywood's disgusting, right? It's got part of the sexually vile and all this stuff.

01:07:47

But me too is full of a bunch of lies because you can't challenge a woman.

01:07:52

Yeah, you can. You should, if you love them. One of the greatest forms of love is to warn people about sin.

01:07:58

And you were alluding to this earlier. If we're not going to correct women for their sin, we don't love them. There's a way to do it.

01:08:04

I'm not going to talk to my daughter the same way I talk to my sons, but I am going to talk to both of them about their sins.

01:08:10

And I'm going to do it in a wise way. And I'm not androgynous. I always point this out with guys. Guys don't like that women.

01:08:17

Women, a lot of times when they communicate, I don't know if I can prove this, I can't prove this, but everyone watching knows

01:08:22

I'm right. So guys generally are A to B, very content, straightforward.

01:08:30

I did this, I did that, I did that. Women, when they tell you a story like, yeah, I was at the grocery store today and this and this.

01:08:36

And as a man, I'm listening like, what's the command? What am I supposed to take out of this? And it's like, it's like, it's like circling around.

01:08:43

And then there's like these little tributaries of stories. Right, right, right. Come experience this journey with me. Yeah, that's right.

01:08:49

Feel what I feel when I was here. What she's doing, she's painting a picture. She's sharing her life with you. Her job is to knit people together.

01:08:55

Her job is to create culture. She's a helpmate. She's a nurturer. Yeah. So nurturers are going to like paint this picture and you're like trying to figure it out.

01:09:03

Right. What's the bottom line? What do I do? What do I take away? Yeah. And guys will get mad that women talk that way.

01:09:08

And I'm like, aren't you glad you're not married to a dude? Yeah. Right. It's like, that's androgynous.

01:09:14

Women are different. You just have to understand how they speak. You know, of course there's some guys that are more like that.

01:09:20

Some women are more like that, but this is, we're speaking in generalities and concentrations. And it's like, if a woman says,

01:09:26

Oh, it sure is cold in here. She might be asking for you to turn the heat on or give a blanket where a guy would just say,

01:09:31

Hey, will you turn the heat on or give me a blanket? This is how we do it. A to B, like you say.

01:09:37

And so we think about men and women. So women are contextual in their speaking a lot of times, where men are more content, indirect contextual, men are direct content driven.

01:09:49

Like tell me what to do. That makes sense. Cause we work together in a very mission oriented like way.

01:09:56

Yeah. That makes total sense. Yeah. So why I bring that up is that we can't go from being a white knight pastor to being a guy that beats on women in talking to women as if they're not different than men.

01:10:12

Right. And I love the example of like a wine goblet versus like a coffee cup, right?

01:10:20

My truck right now at the airport CVG, where I'll be tonight, there are wine or not wine.

01:10:25

There are coffee mugs on the bottom. They're like chipped up and stuff, but they can like drive around and they're fine.

01:10:31

If I did that with a wine goblet, it would get broken. Yeah. Right. But they're both fine for what they are.

01:10:37

Wine goblet is a weaker vessel, but it's perfect for drinking wine.

01:10:43

Yeah. It's just not meant for that purpose. It's suited to its purpose. Yeah. Women are suited to their purpose. There's a weakness that women have that men don't have, but that weakness doesn't get in the way of being a woman.

01:10:53

Right. It just gets in the way of being a man, which they're not made to be anyway. Right. And so I'm not going to talk to a woman the same way

01:10:59

I talk to a man, not because I'm a white knight, but because I believe in sexuality. I believe in maleness and female.

01:11:04

I'm not androgynous. And so this is interesting that you've got almost like the horseshoe, right?

01:11:10

Like I remember once we did a bunch of home births. And the first time we did home birth, we're at like a home birth class.

01:11:18

It's me and Emily. She's pregnant with Hudson. And it's like me, Emily, a lesbian couple that's going to have like a baby.

01:11:25

Okay. This black couple who is from this mega church and they're big like George Bush supporters.

01:11:33

Interesting. It was weird. Okay. And I was like, isn't it wild? It's like old Mario brothers. If you go far enough on the right, you pop out the other side on the left.

01:11:41

And it's like the horseshoe theory is what they call it. So it's interesting, androgynous feminists and androgynous masculinists can kind of happen.

01:11:54

They're like, they're far, but they end up being the same thing in that they don't stress the good distinctions of the sexes, and you have to be careful of that.

01:12:09

So white, don't be a white knight, but don't be an androgynous brash man that treats women like men.

01:12:17

Yeah. And that takes wisdom. You got to learn that in an household. I was just going to say that. I mean, we're talking balance here, which requires wisdom to apply these principles correctly here.

01:12:26

You gave the story of being at the abortion facility and same thing.

01:12:32

I've been there pleading with countless men to go inside and rescue their woman. One actually did.

01:12:37

I remember he went inside. I was just like, go in there and get her out now. And he took that seriously.

01:12:44

He marched in there, dragged her out by the arm, threw in his truck, and they left. And I'm praising God. Fifteen minutes later, same truck pulls back into the clinic, and she goes inside.

01:12:55

He comes to the sidewalk. I'm talking with him, and I was like, bro, what happened? She's like, she's threatening to call the cops on me if I don't let her get the abortion.

01:13:04

Wow. And that is, I mean, again, it requires so much balance. Yes. What you're talking about here, like audience, contextually, how do we speak to men and women in all of these spheres, whether we're on the sidewalk, outside the abortion facility, the church, what the role of the civil magistrate is at the state, all of these work together.

01:13:25

So land in the plane on this, because I know we've been going for a while. If the answer for doing things like ending cultural evil, such as abortion, is restoring godly households, and within that, restoring patriarchy, father rule, godly masculinity, how do we do that?

01:13:47

What is the way to recover men? How do we get them back? What is the means by which they are recovered?

01:13:55

And how do we go about taking part in that project, including us ourselves? What role do we have to play in that as leaders, speakers, those with audiences, those with people under our care, your pastor, and so on and so forth?

01:14:09

How is this recovered? How are men made right? What's the answer? What's the hope to which we should be looking in this?

01:14:16

First and foremost, you must be born again. Right. To the gospel. Yeah, repent, believe the gospel, right?

01:14:22

Be part of the kingdom. The reason for that is easy, is first the approval of God the Father that we have through God the

01:14:29

Son, applied to heart through God the Spirit, is essential. Like the whole world,

01:14:35

I might be a failure in every which way, but I'm saved. I'm washed in the blood, clothed in white robes, ready for eternity.

01:14:43

So God looks on me like he looks on his son at the baptism.

01:14:48

This is my son and whom I'm well pleased. One reason it's good to say that, benediction, like God's make his face to shine upon you.

01:14:56

It's like smiling, God smiles on me. I'm not an object. Yeah, I'm not an object of wrath.

01:15:01

I'm an object of joy, of delight for him. He is my father. Which by the way, is a key to,

01:15:06

I think, understanding being a father. 100%. It's understanding that you're a beloved son. Yes.

01:15:12

Yep. I love my children. I want them... There's a good book,

01:15:17

Faith of the Fatherless by Paul Vitz. And Vitz argues that a lot of hardcore atheists just had bad dads.

01:15:23

Seems to be the case with Nietzsche and the Ubermensch. He had a weak Christian dad and he was looking for the idealized father, which is

01:15:30

God. He is the father. So number one, the gospel. Number two is start to take responsibility for yourself.

01:15:40

Whatever happened to you, however you're victimized, however your dad failed you, now this is you moving forward.

01:15:49

And so forgive your dad where you can forgive him. Like I said, always extend it. Sometimes they won't take it.

01:15:54

That's not on you. It's your job to extend it. It's their job to take it. So then now you start taking responsibility for yourself in little things.

01:16:02

First and foremost, be disciplined in your spiritual disciplines. Number one thing for a

01:16:07

Christian man to do is go to church every Sunday. More important than reading the Bible every day is to go to church on Sunday.

01:16:14

People didn't used to have Bibles. It's a new thing. It's like... Yeah, they went to hear the word preached. That's why you give attention to the reading of the word so you can memorize it.

01:16:23

So first thing, create a rhythm of worship in your life. Six days of labor, one day of worship.

01:16:30

Worship and rest, go do that. So now you've got, you're going to church, you're building that discipline. Now, where can you take responsibility in your life?

01:16:37

This is why like Jordan Peterson saying, clean your bed, like... Resonates. Right. These guys are like, oh, this is the craziest thing.

01:16:44

It's pretty simple. This is also why I think like lifting weights is so empowering to a lot of these men, is that when your health is not good and you start to lift weights and you change your health and you're like, oh, my effort actually affects my life.

01:16:59

Like when guys see that, it gives them hope that they can take charge. They can actually take over things.

01:17:06

So start taking charge, clean your room, create a budget, find, run, walk, lift, whatever, like take charge over your health however you can.

01:17:20

So start taking charge in little things first and then do them for a long time, like stack habits, and you build a habit, then stack another one, like keep stacking them.

01:17:34

It's like James and atomic habits. We don't rise to our level of goals. We fall to our level of systems.

01:17:40

Systems is another way of, all men have habits. This is whether they're good or bad, right?

01:17:46

You're always building habits. So stop building bad ones. So you got the holy habit of going to church.

01:17:53

Now you got the habit, I'm gonna wake up and read my Bible. You start taking responsibility for yourself and you start having a surplus of time, of energy, of money.

01:18:05

And as soon as you do that, then you start applying that to marriage, whatever.

01:18:10

Now let's say you are married. So I have a magical ability to gain and lose 45 pounds every other year or so.

01:18:19

But a couple of years ago, I was like, I gotta lose this weight, man.

01:18:25

So I just started running. I would come home. I remember I ran through a tornado warning once.

01:18:32

I decided no matter what, I was gonna run. Yeah. So I come home from the church, put my clothes on, not say hi to anyone, go run two miles, come back.

01:18:41

And then I was like, oh man, I just eat like one meal a day. And so I lost a bunch of weight and I didn't tell my wife

01:18:49

I was gonna do it and I didn't invite her. I didn't say, you should run with me too. I didn't say any of that. I just did it.

01:18:55

And she said, hey, I know you've been running a lot. It looks like you lost some weight. I was like, yeah, I'm trying to just be diligent here.

01:19:00

She's like, do you mind if I run with you? I was like, I'd love it. You should come with me. She saw and she wanted to join. Yeah. So we started running together.

01:19:06

So I'd come home, she and I would run together every day for like a year and a half.

01:19:12

So like we'd run, actually we'd run to the Goodman's house. And I would always say, man, it's good to be a man.

01:19:18

That's where the title of the book came from. How could you not? Well, that's a nugget right there that the audience needed. I lived in Twin Lakes in Moore, South Carolina.

01:19:27

And there's the Goodman's on, I forget the name of the street. So we'd stop there and talk like, what do you think?

01:19:34

How do you think Hudson's doing? How do you think Cayman's doing? We'd talk a little bit. So it's like, you start taking responsibility for yourself and then people want to follow your lead.

01:19:44

And what I tell guys in bad marriages is like, man, you just can't scream at her. You can't like start working on yourself.

01:19:50

Cause that's where you have control, control the controllables, you know, and pray for her. What if she won't follow?

01:19:55

Well, what do you want to do? You want to like wrestle her to the ground and force her to follow?

01:20:01

That's not how it works. At least you are growing. So that's that, take responsibility where you can.

01:20:07

Start somewhere. And that's kind of it, man. It's the bike chain metaphor, which

01:20:12

I'm very, like I love. So when a chain falls off a bike, you've, yeah, that forward motion pops it on.

01:20:20

And just, you know, you start taking responsibility for yourself. Like this is outside of my control.

01:20:26

I can't do anything about it. You know, there's things that we all want to control. That's the problem with this. A lot of these young men is they'll say, well,

01:20:33

I don't think it should be that way. It is. What are you going to do about it? Well, you know,

01:20:39

I'm going to talk about how it's broken. I'm like, well, I don't got time for that. Like I'll say here and there, but I can do this.

01:20:46

We're not building anything. Yeah. And so that's, that's all we tell most guys. And then like, so we're doing man on a mission is our men's thing that we start in January.

01:20:56

And so we have six sessions over six months on spiritual disciplines, physical, financial, relational, right.

01:21:06

Vocational. And then one's this overall on mission, but it's really focused on helping guys just like start creating holy habits and holding each other accountable.

01:21:14

So I think the other thing besides like taking those actions is trying to find other people doing it too. Yeah. Find men that aren't bitter.

01:21:22

That's doing something, you know, and I, I tell you, I've gotten ahead in life because I have good friends and good mentors and I stick close to my friends when you're like gaining influence, you know, you write a book and, you know, people think you're something, you know people will say, you should upgrade your friends.

01:21:42

Not me, man. No, I'm sticking. I'm sticking with those guys to the end. These are my brothers. They knew me before anyone else cared.

01:21:48

And when everyone else stops caring, they'll still care. And they'll call me on my stuff. They'll say, nah, you're getting fat.

01:21:54

No, you're being lazy. And it'll come from love or like, you can do this. I'm with you. Or I'm really proud of you.

01:22:00

Like having other brothers, you know, that tease you a little bit, but do out of love and stir you up.

01:22:08

It's priceless. And I think guys want that from their wife. I don't expect that from my wife.

01:22:13

She gives it to me. But women like expect us to be strong for them. They kind of resent us when they're weak.

01:22:18

Like I'm the weaker vessel. I thought you were the one I could lean on. Like now, you know, like send them like rub your whole sweetheart.

01:22:26

It's going to be all right. But guys actually, I think sometimes are way more sympathetic to masculine struggles.

01:22:34

Like been there, you can get this. So get saved. Go to church, build habits, surround yourself with someone doing something.

01:22:43

Where do I find them? Somewhere. At the gym, like ask the guy, like,

01:22:49

Hey man, you want to go see a boxing match with me? Or you want to go hang out or whatever, build friendships. Well, what if it doesn't happen right away?

01:22:54

It doesn't. It doesn't. You're not, this isn't first grade. Like in first grade, you're all kind of trauma bond.

01:23:01

You're ripped from your family. You're in this thing. And now like, will you be my friend? How many of us have like really close friends?

01:23:07

Like in some grade school, like, will you be my friend? And that's how it happened. Yeah. That's not how it happens in your late twenties, thirties and forties.

01:23:14

Okay. You start hanging out and you do that for like a year.

01:23:20

And then you start to become friends and start to trust each other. There's no, you just gotta be steady and commit to it or it'll never change.

01:23:31

If you're looking for a silver bullet, they don't exist outside of the power of the gospel, getting you heading, headed the right direction.

01:23:38

Those are some of the things I'd say. Yeah. I hope this has been helpful for everyone.

01:23:44

Thanks so much for Pastor Foster for coming and doing this. It's, I know it's been a blessing to me, brother.

01:23:50

Thank you. So where can people go to get you? I know you're online. This is

01:23:56

Foster tends to be the tagline or the. I'm on Twitter. Anything I'm up to you find me there.

01:24:01

Okay. So socials, the podcast, get the book. It's good to be a man. Get copies for your church.