Cuckolds, Capons, and Cotqueans

Introduction

I trust that you have watched the NQN trailer three or four times now, and so you may have noticed the line about “apocalypse proofing” your family. The first step in learning how to do this is to learn how to quit doing the things that do not work at all. Well, correct that, actually. The first thing to do is to quit doing the things that are causing the problem, and then after that to quit trotting out the solutions that don’t work at all.

One of the lame maneuvers is that of pretending that no apocalypse is happening, and hence there is no need to do anything. That works about as well as you might expect.

The other is to recognize that there are in fact grave threats hurtling toward you and your family, in the form of fireballs the size of grapefruit, and so you undertake to ward them off with the shield you obtained for $19.95 from Joyce Meyer Ministries. That shield is made out of balsa wood and tissue paper and, in the insult-to-injury department, the tissue paper is pink. And far from slowing anything down, these shields just made the fireballs act a little happier somehow.

The problem has been a dearth of biblical masculinity, and the solution is naturally going to require a restoration of biblical masculinity. More on this anon, as we boomers like to put it. Yea, verily.

Like a Stick of Cotton Candy

The last few years was a stress test that a kindly providence applied to the Approved Evangelical Leadership of North America (AELNA) and, speaking of fireballs, the AELNA disappeared in one. This stress test consisted of a number of new and unique pressures, of the sort concerning which our seminaries of homiletical slickness had not offered any courses. And, as we have now discovered, the ability to be glib and slick during the Q&A of whatever the heck conference it might have been turned out to be an ability that was of no use at all when it came to dealing with Donald Trump, Trump Derangement Syndrome, toxic slop from Wuhan, election-rigging, the eager adoption of mandatory pathogen collectors for the face, the shutdown of our obviously non-essential worship services, and of course the obligatory vaccine for a population of docile pin cushions.

Watching the shepherds harangue the sheep about Romans 13 was like watching an eighth grade student council president pull rank on a fifth grader over a seat in the lunchroom, threatening to “tell teacher.”

And watching the wolves deal with the shepherds was like watching someone take a blow torch to a stick of cotton candy.

The Grace of Crisis

One of the things that God does in history is to give us periodic foretastes of what will happen at the end of history. Recognized or not, all of us spend every day dealing with the permanent things right alongside the evanescent things. Because of our frailty, those categories can get a bit blurry for us, and we can sometimes forget which is which. One seems to blend into the other, and this is why God will regularly grant us the grace of a crisis. And when the grace is great, the crisis is great.

What a crisis does is separate. It divides up the things that matter from the things that don’t matter. It separates the eternal things, the permanent things, from the passing and temporal things. Our lives are surrounded every day with things that cannot be shaken and things that can be. And because we get in a muddle over it, God periodically grants us the grace of an earthquake.

A storm is revelatory. A good storm is apocalyptic. The word apocalypse means an unveiling. The Latin equivalent is revelatio, from which we get our name for the book of Revelation. But what is revealed in a God-given crisis? Some think is a pulling back of the curtain so that we can just see the cables and ropes back stage, and the scenery waiting for Act 2. But I think it would be better to think of the unveiling as a manifestation of the difference between the marble pillars and the plaster ones.

The storm hit both houses hard, and it revealed the difference that true bedrock makes. All the extra money that was spent getting down to bedrock paid off, and that same amount of money that went into the curb appeal of the other house instead . . . well, that curb appeal is now kindling. The shutters had been a nice touch. That’s one of them there, over in the road next to the stop sign.

We are warned about this form of grace in multiple places. It is almost as though God wanted Christian ministers to think about this a lot.

This passage is likely talking about the last day, but we should remember that God is a true master of foreshadowing. What He will do at the end of history He has done many time throughout history. And if you and your ministry could not run with men, then how will you run with horses (Jer. 12:5)? If your ministry could not withstand a bad case of the flu and a ginned-up and stampeding panic, then how will you ministry do when the heavens are rolled back like a scroll, and the mountains and islands are moved in their places?

Quit You Like Men

And so not only is biblical masculinity not the disease, it is the solution.

God has determined that men should occupy the positions of leadership in each of the basic governments that He has established among men. These governments would be those of our civic life (Is. 3:12), our life together in the church (1 Tim. 2:12), and in the family (1 Cor. 11:3). In the first place, He appointed men to take glad and sacrificial responsibility in these areas, and by men, I mean males. In addition to that, He required the males that He placed in these positions of authority and responsibility to act like men, and not simply males.

When this is operating the way it ought to operate, the result is something called the patriarchy—that which, according to our soi disant and lisping political theorists, must be smashed. Only they say something like thmasth.

The problem is that it is not possible to smash the foundation without also destroying the house. It is not possible to smash the patriarchy without also smashing everything that it was holding up. And as we look around at the demolition job that is occurring throughout our culture, and the smoke that is rising up from the debris, the thought occurs to us that this may have been the point all along.

One of the blessings that such biblical leadership provides is that of a masculine presence and authority when a crisis hits. And so that is what a lot of people are looking around for now, but there is a problem.

Exile or Desertion?

In Christian circles, it has become customary to lament all the abdicating men. But it would be more accurate, and sound more like real repentance, if we acknowledged that the men who were willing to act like men have all been outlawed. Banished as they were, we didn’t see much of them, and then we pretended that their absence was voluntary on their part. But the exiles were exiled, and didn’t go AWOL. They were not deserters.

We could go to them, and ask them to return. We could humble ourselves as the elders of Gilead did, and plead with Jephthah to come back (Judges 11). They exiled him, for reasons that seemed like a good idea to them at the time, but at least they had the good sense to realize that this is what they had done. They didn’t hold seminars in the AELNA faculty lounge in order to puzzle over where Jephthah had gotten to. And so when they were confronted with the might of Ammon, and the crisis they brought in with them, they were willing to go to the land of Tob to bring Jephthah back.

American men can be invited back. They didn’t shimmer off and evaporate. They are still around. But what will not work is to invite them back in order to play the role of cuckolds, capons and cotqueans. They will not come back in order to serve as replacements or administrative assistants for the current crop of gamma males. They will not return in order to augment the ranks of the little old ladies of both sexes.

Men will always be dominant, in the very nature of the case. They are capable of being dominant in incredibly constructive ways, in ways that are a true marvel. But we, in the grip of a very peculiar frenzy that has a death grip on our little lizard brains, have decided to outlaw constructive dominance.

This has opened the door for some men to resort to the dominance of criminal destructiveness, a thing which now exiled men used to prevent. It has also resulted in others taking the path of simply checking out, leaving, going into exile. But that is also destructive. When competent men leave, things start falling apart. What the sexual revolution and feminism did was to conduct a grand experiment on how long our culture could defer maintenance on, you know, everything. The answer appears to be sixty years, give or take.

But a handful of men, like Strider, became rangers in the north, and decided to contribute constructively anyway, illegally and off-budget. Don’t tell anybody.

Relentless Giveways!

Here is what we propose to do.

During the week of November 1st through the 5th, you can get my e-book The Covenant Household free on Kindle. In addition, you can listen to the audiobook free on Canon+. And of course, you should stay notified of everything we’re going to be giving away at noquarternovember.com.

And if all that festivity were not enough, my little Mablog shoppe here is—for the duration of this very same week—giving away my book for kids called The Adventures of Fun Dad. In the realm of picture books, this one is my manga opus. So to speak.