Introduction
It is worth mentioning at the outset that Barak was a great hero of the faith, and not a timid man at all. He was no coward, and he won a great battle on behalf of the people of Israel.
“And what more shall I say? For the time would fail me to tell of Gideon and Barak and Samson and Jephthah, also of David and Samuel and the prophets: who through faith subdued kingdoms, worked righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions . . .”Hebrews 11:32–33 (NKJV)
When he refused to go to battle unless Deborah accompanied them, she did tell him that he would miss out on just one thing as a result. We will get to that one thing in a minute.
Deborah, a prophetess, the wife of Lapidoth, was already a judge in Israel when the scene first opens (Judg. 4:4-5). Moved by God, she summoned Barak and told him to go and fight against Sisera, and that if he did so he would prevail (Judg. 4: 6-7). He replied that if she agreed to accompany them, he would do it. If not, then not (Judg. 4:8). Deborah’s reply, greatly misunderstood to this day, was that she would in fact go, but that as a result of the condition placed on it he would miss out on a particular honor—the honor of killing Sisera himself (Judg. 4:9). “The Lord shall sell Sisera into the hand of a woman.” This was a prophecy of Jael’s intrepid action, when she fastened Sisera’s head to the tent floor more securely than it had been before.
The particular honor of killing Sisera himself was forfeited by Barak, true enough, but there is no indication he complained about it. However then . . . in the great hall of faith/fame in Hebrews 11, Deborah is not mentioned, and Jael is not mentioned either. But Barak is mentioned by name—”who through faith subdued kingdoms.” Deborah accompanied him to the river Kishon, but did not accompany him into the book of Hebrews. So it is long past time for us to be done sneering at Barak, who won a great battle and secured a place of honorable mention in the New Testament, unlike all the rest of us around here.
At the same time, there is no hint that Deborah was out of line for exercising her prophetic gift, or for judging Israel. So as we look at the history of the judges, we can glean an important principle about women in roles of civic leadership. That principle is that it is no sin for a woman to hold political office, provided it is as rare as a blue comet.
Having gotten that out of the way, we may proceed to discuss our actual problems here in the actual evangelical longhouse. As we discuss this, we are going to walk all the way around the boardwalk, from the so-called heiresses of Deborah, to Allie Beth’s recent exhortation, to the sexual dysfunction of groyperism, to Tucker and Fuentes, and then all the way back to the semi-respectable evangelical longhouse. That semi is important, for it is what makes all the hypocrisy possible.
An Inch and a Mile
One is likely acquainted, of course, with the proverb that if you give a certain kind of person an inch, they are likely the kind of person who will then take a mile. You work your way through the book of Judges, evaluating the career of one male judge after another. You took note of Deborah, for she is certainly in there, registering the oddity of it to yourself. But knowing that all of Scripture is God-breathed, and that we should come to the Scriptures with an eagerness to apply what we read there, you consequently budget for the occasional Margaret Thatcher. Depending on how you count them, there are 12 to 15 judges of Israel, which would make Deborah’s office about 8% of the total. So the lesson to be drawn is obviously that women in positions of civic leadership is not prohibited, provided that you maintain males in those positions at 90% or higher. That would be the level at which a society could safely be considered a patriarchal one.
But I mentioned taking a mile. If you grant that Deborah was an actual judge, and she was not condemned for it, and neither was Lapidoth for that matter, and the first thing you know, the US. Senate has filled up with 57 Deborahs, something is radically askew. When you have 57 Deborahs, the realization slowly dawns on you that you have no Deborahs at all. If we had an actual Deborah, she, being a prophetess from God, would tell everyone to knock it off. She would say, in the words of one of our recent prophets, “Go home.”
“As for my people, children are their oppressors, and women rule over them. O my people, they which lead thee cause thee to err, and destroy the way of thy paths.”Isaiah 3:12 (KJV)
So if you take a look around and discover that our body politic is festooned in feminists, girl bosses, take-charge fitness trainers, peroxided conservative commentators, and harridan senators, not to mention the cleavage bros, you realize that we have been had.
It is kind of like celiac disease, a real thing and something that used to be something of a rare condition. But now, with restaurants falling all over themselves to rejigger their menus for everybody and their gluten intolerant dog, one begins to suspect that we are dealing with something of a social contagion, a combination of celiac and boutique celiac. And in a similar way, we in the conservative Christian world are dealing with a social contagion of DINOs—Deborahs in Name Only.
Mom! Allie Beth’s Bossing Me!
So here we all are, in the feminist longhouse, wondering if there is a good way to navigate our way out of this leper colony. The longhouse rules dictate what the docile men are supposed to do, which they willingly do as their civic duty, abjuring their privilege as they go. Of course they do. But the rules are so entrenched that they also affect and drive the behavior of many of those who fancy themselves restive rebels against the matriarchy. But the feminists have done a more thorough job smashing the patriarchy than the click bait bros have done in smashing the longhouse.
For example, Allie Beth Stuckey did a thing, and gave a big sister talk to the men. Like most big sisters, she did not anticipate how it would come across, and found that her pungent observations were, um, underappreciated. She even had that big sister tone, which didn’t help. There were howls of protest, many of them from men who found that they would rather talk about Allie Beth getting out of her lane than to even think about the men who have been enervated by porn. That would be to acknowledge that big sister might have had something of a point, and in many of the cases she might have had a point about their own browser histories. But rather than think about their own browser histories, they concluded it would be much more edifying to yell about Allie Beth’s conservative variant of feminism. And so yell they did.
Bedrock of All That is Rancid
Even for November, is this not getting out too far over my skis? Is this not a case of driving so fast at night that I outran my own headlights? On what basis do I make pronouncements about the browser histories of various unnamed Allie Beth critics? Especially regarding the anons, about whom I should know precious little. But if you think I know precious little, have you forgotten my connections to the Mossad? Didn’t you watch the video?
But seriously, even apart from any possible intel, the issue is simple. You all recall the metaphor of the “tip of the iceberg,” right? You can see 10% of the thing above the surface of the water, while the vast bulk of the thing is down below. There is a certain kind of behavior that we can see out there in the world—the tip of the iceberg that is visible and Scripture describes it for us, describing the whole thing down to the icy bottom of it, and so here you go:
“For I fear, lest, when I come, I shall not find you such as I would, and that I shall be found unto you such as ye would not: lest there be debates, envyings, wraths, strifes, backbitings, whisperings, swellings, tumults: And lest, when I come again, my God will humble me among you, and that I shall bewail many which have sinned already, and have not repented of the uncleanness and fornication and lasciviousness which they have committed.”2 Corinthians 12:20–21 (KJV)
The public part, the part that you can see, is made up of “debates, envyings, wraths, strifes, backbitings, whisperings, swellings, and tumults.” In short, we are talking about all the misbehavior that is routinely on display in a contentious comment thread on X. I am not sure I have ever seen a better description of the nature of such comment threads. And so in short, whenever such a display erupts, we are clearly talking about men who are less conversant with Deborah Judges Israel and more conversant with Debbie Does Dallas.
We can say this because when Paul comes to Corinth and turns over the flat rock of “backbitings, swellings, and tumults,” he knows that what he is going to find will be the worms and beetles of “uncleanness, fornication, and lasciviousness.” He knows that, and because he wrote it down in just the way he did, we know that too. Paul describes the smoke for us, and he also describes the fire.
Tucker and Fuentes
The conservative movement is currently in an uproar over the fact that Tucker interviewed Nick Fuentes. There have of course been demands for performative denunciations, and there has been some compliance on that front, along with some interesting resistance. We have also seen some honest denunciations from those people who have always been opposed to the Fuentes-brand of spite and malice, and not just because the left demands that they be opposed to it. There were also some objections, not the fact of the interview, but rather to the fact that it was a softball interview. So all of that is going on.
I am not going to denounce Tucker here, but I am going to warn him as a friend. If you reread the previous section, you will see and understand why I believe that there is no way for Fuentes to display openly and publicly the kind of demented attitudes toward sex and women the way that he does without having multiple black mold closets in his life, filled with the rotting debris of gangrenous lusts. The portrayals of gay porn that he has accidentally broadcast in the past provide just a glimpse of what is obviously going on. He has offered various explanations, of course—of the “aliens kidnapped me, what year is it?” variety—and anyone who accepts such explanations at face value might be the very chumpiest of chumps. Nick Fuentes is bad news, and one very lost puppy.
When I was with Tucker, one of the things we talked about was “sabbath dinners.” Our family congregates every Saturday night in order to inaugurate the Lord’s Day, and we are all together in it. Tucker asked me how many of my children and grandchildren were Christians, and by the grace of God I was able to say “all of them.” Everyone is in fellowship and we gather weekly to pray, sing, and eat together. Now Tucker told me that his greatest desire was to be “the ancestor” at the head of such a table, in just this way, with all of his people gathered around, sharing table fellowship together. And I believe that Tucker was absolutely sincere in saying that. He is right to want that. It is one of the greatest earthly blessings that I have ever been given, and there is no amount of money that I would accept in exchange for it.
But the dank right is genuinely dank. That road leads to the abyss, where there is no table fellowship. And I am not warning Tucker about his marriage. We were talking about generations. We were talking about “your people.” Fuentes’ kids, if he ever manages to have any, are not going to marry and have kids who would be willing to show up for any kind of Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving. If he does not die a lonely incel, the path he is on is far more likely to produce results like this . . . two estranged granddaughters, both of whom had their breasts cut off, a grandson with his live-in boyfriend, assorted surly others with Halloween hair, three divorced kids, a cousin who didn’t get out of rehab in time to make it, and a couple of dogs that won’t stop barking.
This is not a prophecy. It is a word painting.
So my warning for Tucker is this. There is a generation that “have corrupted themselves”— “perverse and crooked.” (Dt. 32:5). The Lord looks at them, and He says, “I will see what their end shall be” (Dt. 32:20). These cautions are taken from the Song of Moses, the solemn warning that he gave to Israel as a testimony against them. It also contains the text for Jonathan Edwards’ famous sermon about sinners in the hands of an angry God—”their foot shall slip in due time” (Dt. 32:35). They are a “nation void of counsel, neither is there any understanding in them” (Dt. 32:28).
In sum, it is not possible to be as openly disobedient as the dank right is without that indicating that they are living downwind of the sewage lagoon containing all their real rebellions. And the transgressive things I am talking about are not a negative view of Netanyahu, but rather things like lusting after your sister.
In short, two tons of no bueno.
The Mortification of Soft Feminism in the Church
So let’s bring all this back to what I earlier called the evangelical longhouse, soft feminism within the church.
An uncharitable read of Allie Beth’s comments—”We need your masculinity and your strength and courage and we need those things to be harnessed for good”—would be to assume that she was talking about opening jars and getting things off the top shelf in the pantry, and so on. “Harnessed for good” could be made to sound as though the ladies are booted, spurred, and ready to ride. The women have decided to host a great banquet that will put everything right in the church and they need to men to be cooperative so that they might carry the tables.
But there is another way to read the appeal. Masculinity is the glad assumption of sacrificial responsibility. Strength and courage are characteristics of men who are able and willing to lead. If men generally were to look past the big sister aspect of Allie Beth’s exhortation, and really walk away from porn, one of the direct consequences would actually be the formation of a biblical patriarchy.
Biblical patriarchy will not be achieved by running anon accounts to snark at the men who have jobs and families to feed. Nor will it be achieved by snarking at Allie Beth. Biblical patriarchy depends upon men being sexually devoted to their wives, forsaking all others. That is why porn must be outlawed—but it must be banished from the lives of Christian men before anything else could ever be done.
The reason we have more aspiring Deborahs in the church than is proper is in part because of the ubiquity of porn. When Christian men use porn and their wives don’t know, the men are reluctant to take the initiative and lead because they know they are not qualified to do so. And when their women do know about the problem, the men are in the doghouse, and are in no position to be spiritually assertive. And to add another layer of weirdness to it, there are women who on some level like the fact that their husbands “struggle” with porn, because they appreciate the leverage that the doghouse gives to them. Sure, they don’t like it in one way, finding it distasteful and all, but if the husband ever got real victory over that sin, and began leading his family as he ought to, she might find that she likes that set up even less.
This is because in the creation order, women were created to be responsive to their husbands (Eph. 5:22). That desire is in their marrow. But because of the Fall, the Lord God ordained that a certain level of leadership tension will always exist between husband and wife (Gen. 3:16). This can create some interesting churn in a woman’s heart—where she despises a man she can dominate, and at the same time likes getting her way.
So we should really be interested in getting rid of 56 wannabe Deborahs. And you might even think that Allie Beth is one of them. I don’t care. But we are not going to get rid of any of them until we come to realize the value of point she was making.
Don’t Ever Neglect the Giveaways
There are two places to go for your giveaways. The first is the special page that Canon set up to process their giveaways, which can be found here. The offers will change throughout the month, but for the Canon titles, it will always in the same place.
The second place to go would be to my Mablog Shoppe, in order to obtain Concise and to the Point, and Virgins and Volcanoes.
Happy browsing.
