Transcription
Please join me in giving a warm welcome to Pastor Eric Khan.
>> [screaming] [applause] >> I like, I like, I like the dog barking. Thank you. It's very good. How's everybody doing this Saturday morning? Yeah, I'm feeling refreshed. I went to a a concert. Some of you were there last night. Very good. Very emotional. [snorts] Brian's songs, they get me in the heart. Especially when he sang Little Sebastian. Done for. I looked at the crowd, everybody was mouthing the words. It's a beautiful thing.
Well, this morning we're going to be talking about the longhouse in the war against normal. I thought, being me, I would keep it chill. And because Miles Charcuterie the 14th is melting down on X, this should be fitting. Some of you are going home to churches. And I don't know if you'll be welcome there after having been here. So, we'll see. Hopefully this talk will help you and inspire you and give you some courage.
Now, as many of you are probably aware, Brian and I are writing a book about the longhouse. And that that project is actually complete. So, we've turned that in to the editor. Yeah. Yeah, great. Very excited about that. That is a very large book, so it's going to take a little while to edit. Uh, over 100,000 words. I think over 300 footnotes. And uh, I I did a lot of that, and Brian did a lot of that, so we're very proud of it. And so, in this talk, I want to address just briefly some of the themes that will address in the book. Of course, this is just a brief snapshot. They told me I didn't have 100,000 words to speak this morning. And they run a timer for you. So, you have no choice.
So, what is the longhouse? We're going to get into that this morning. Some of you probably wonder about that, but essentially it's how Marxism and egalitarianism and feminism have torn down the normal of old Western civilization. And they have replaced it with a female norm and female dominated society. So my hope this morning as we delve into this subject is that you would have a better understanding of how the enemy won and where we especially need to be fighting.
So what is the longhouse? Well, on the dissident right, the longhouse has been a term that has been used to describe the rising societal dominance of again egalitarian, Marxist, and feminist ideals across society. So if you want like a TLDR short version, it would be this: The longhouse is a female ruled and female normed society.
Now the concept originated from sort of allegedly Iroquois or Indian tribes where they would build longhouses over which matriarchs would rule. And you can think of this rule like the den mother or the COVID Karen today. Everybody's favorite person. So in the longhouse, men are forced to live under this oppressive feminist gaze, much like the eye of Sauron. And that's not pleasant, by the way, as many of you are finding out. When you tell a joke so good that you have to go to the HR department because they want to hear it again. Anybody been there? I've been there. Yeah. That's why we don't have HR anymore at our company. It's great. Amen. We don't need it.
So the longhouse was also a term developed by BAP in his book and then in 2023 by Jonathan Kiefermann in First Things. And this is what he says about the longhouse. He says, "The long house refers at once to our increasingly degraded mode of technocratic governance, but also to wokeness, to the progressive, to the liberal, to the secular values that pervade all major institutions. The long house refers to the remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations towards social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling and directing and modeling behavior." End quote.
So here would be a few of the rules that you can typically find that governs social life in the long house. Number one, conflict is dealt with indirectly rather than directly. I'm going to give a hypothetical, but it's like if you went to a conference and your pastor never talked to you, but then you saw on X that he was asking the Presbytery to put a a new statement out against you and against that conference in Ogden, Utah, hypothetically. I'm not saying that happened yesterday on X. Right? This is a feminine coded way of dealing with problems.
Number two, men and women are not sexually distinct in the long house, and there is not any meaningful way in which we can separate the two. Therefore, they will say women can rule in any sphere, contrary to the word of God which says men shall rule in home, church, and in the civic space, and in the workforce. Right? This is part of the long house.
Also, public discourse is ordered around not giving offense or doing harm rather than truth or free speech. So if you say something true like, actually, because you put a dress on, you're not now a woman if you were born a man. We would say, "Well, that's But that's true." And the long house would say, "Yeah, but that hurts my feelings." And it's usually white liberal women. Correct? So this is how the long house is going to function with speech.
The next thing is that safety becomes the highest moral good over against risk, adventure, or achievement. Right? So, this is why last year we did safety third. And we're trying to encourage people to be adventurous and courageous and to take calculated risks for the good of your people.
Next, we could say that the long house has a rule against speech and action that will lead ultimately to cancellations and doxings and other forms of ostracism, which are, as we'll see, feminine in their type.
Next, we can say about the long house, many of you have found this out, David Edginton knows this, women are never at fault in the long house. Right? They can do almost anything and they're never at fault. So, pastors in the church, but elsewhere in society as well, it becomes increasingly difficult to correct hysterical women who often will rule in this type of setting.
Next, we could say that minorities and sexual degenerates can do whatever they want. Right? Because they have victim status in the long house. Tied to this, all white men are evil without exception. All right, we've figured this one out in our society. And finally, these two masculine energy tendencies, competitive spirit, and desire to create hierarchy of competence are eliminated. And then finally, the most hysterical members of society are the ones who win control. Think about the woman in Minneapolis in her Honda Pilot. She is the one who's going to get media attention even though she tries to run over an ICE officer, and then there are some tough consequences for her.
One other way I want to talk about uh, this morning, about the long house and how it's affected society is by going back and asking a question about what society was like before the longhouse changed everything and we really have to go back to something like the 1960s. Most of you probably were not born before then or you didn't live through that time period at least. So it's worth asking the question, what was taken from us? What did the longhouse take from us and what have we lost?
So I want you to consider this. These are some startling facts. We bring them up in the book and we go into greater detail. But America in 1960 was a largely patriarchal society where men still ruled economically and politically. Most of the power structures were white and Christian. This was the dominant culture shaping force in America.
So for example, as recently as 1950, 90% of the population was comprised of white European stock. Does that shock anybody? 90% of the population was white European stock. Most of us have lived in multiculturalism for so long that that seems unfathomable. Also, 95%. This one's wild to me. In 1960, 95% of Americans identified as Christian. That's a pretty staggering fact. Yet by 1960, whites had decreased as a percentage of the population only slightly down to 88.6%. So still this powerful voting block and those hegemonic group. This was the age of the WASP, the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. And this is probably the zenith of that people and time period.
Again, men in this period were the primary breadwinners even until 1960 and they had a labor participation rate around 86.4% while women were only 33%. Now this is also staggering. 84% of married women with children stayed at home in 1960. Right? This was an era in which white Christian men were still the clear leaders in home, church, and in politics.
Well, what's changed? What have we lost? What about today? The white share of the American population has shrunk to 59.8%. And most people project that it will become a minority by 2045. That's not very long from now, if you think about it.
Marriage as an institution has fallen out of vogue. So, in 1960, roughly 70% of adult women were married. 70%. Whereas today, it is only 46%. The median age of marriage for women in 1960 was 20 years old. Today, it's almost 30. Women have also entered the workforce in mass, as we'll see the reasons why that was, and just 29% of mothers today stay at home. I I think they're all in this room. Most of them. Right? In 1950, how many, how many women, what percentage of women do you think stayed at home? Well, the answer is 85%. Right? That's a drastic change in just a few short decades.
This one is also interesting, partic- particularly for the church. Church attendance has plummeted. So, in 1960, 73% of Americans attended church. 73%. In 2020, that number fell to 50%. So, from 73% to just 50% in 2020. But, here's a fascinating drop-off. By 2023, that 50% became 26%. Do you think they knew what they were doing with COVID lockdowns? Right? They were trying to stop Americans from going to church, and the faith has become so weak in so many evangelical sectors that it worked. Again, that's not a typo. That's actually what happened in just 3 years. And then even more so if you track back to 1960.
So, in other words, in just a few short decades, America was forcibly de-Christianized. Its families were destroyed, women entered the workforce in mass, marriage and children became unpopular, and the once European stock that were the the foundation of this country were forcibly replaced, forcibly replaced by foreigners who worship strange gods. Right? Radical leftist secularism replaced Christian conviction. It has been a a tragic, if I might say so, national suicide aided and abetted by cultural elites and a ruling class with quite, frankly, evil intentions.
So, for the remainder of this talk, I want to address the key battlegrounds upon which the egalitarians and the liberals fought and won this great revolution. And again, hopefully as you hear this, it's it should make you mad to a certain extent, but it should also convict you about why these areas are so important, why we have to fight here. Number one, revolutionaries waged a legal a legal revolution against heritage America, and they won.
So, if you haven't read this book yet, it's really good. It's Christopher Caldwell, In the Age of Entitlement. But he points out all the legal sweeping changes in the 1960s, which essentially deleted the original Constitution and ushered in a new civil rights era. Often you'll hear people say, "W- Well, we need to go back to the Constitution." And we should say, "Which one? The first or post-1960s?" And we should say, "The first one." And here's the important point for us to understand. Culture change is downstream from the legal system. Right? So often you hear this moniker in reform circles that culture is downstream from the church. And that is true to some extent. But as we'll see, it was these legal changes that really led to cultural change. Most of the legal changes, by the way, when they happened in the '60s, were wildly unpopular, and they were forced on Americans by the cultural elite. Right.
So, here are some of those things that happened. In the 1960s, the leftist progressive agenda, of which feminism is a part, enjoyed a series of pivotal breakthroughs. Number one, no-fault divorce, signed by law in 1969 by that great conservative, Ronald Reagan. Also, he was one of the first to legalize abortion. Abortion was fully legalized in 1973 with Roe v. Wade. Again, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 replaced the first Constitution, especially destroying the freedom to assemble as one wishes. But in 1961 as well, John F. Kennedy issued affirmative action as an order for hiring. So, this is pre-Civil Rights Act officially. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act sent women into the workforce in mass. And here's another huge one, the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 opened the floodgates of multiculturalism with third-world immigration. Before then, most of your immigration came from Ireland, and the UK, and northwestern Europe. And then all of a sudden, somebody, Emanuel Celler, who's Jewish, decided that it would be good to flood the West with a bunch of third-world immigrants like the Somalis who behead people. Well, this changes a culture. In fact, we should see it as an act of war. 1960, the birth control pill is approved by the FDA, allowing women and men to have sex without consequence. And think about this, the pill, over 300 million women worldwide have used the pill since its inception, and it's probably more than that, I would guess. Again, think about this, the tectonic cultural changes that have followed in American society, the destruction of the family, children born out of wedlock, and the mass rejection of Protestant Christianity, all of this stands downstream from at least legal and political changes. This is why political process is so important for Christians, and we need to think through these things very seriously.
So, that was number one. Number two, a pink-collar economy replaced a blue-collar economy, and this was bad for men, and it happened because of the great feminization in the country, but also in the economy.
Now, one of the main aims of the Marxists and feminists, quite obviously, was to disrupt the household by sending women into the workforce. And we often talk about what this does to the household, but as Pastor Madden pointed out, we need to think about what it's doing economically, as well. If most of the men in your church go to work a job that destroys their soul, and they have to report to an HR Karen, and they have to do work that was most normally suited for women, this is going to be a serious problem. So, legal changes come, women are forced into the workforce, and then we get something in 1958 that has been just a glory of civilization, the human resources department. It's great. Right? Why did they have to do this, though? Think about this. Well, as more women come into the workplace, you have to make it more conducive to the female sex. And then fast forward that process 80 years to today, and it means that most colleges, public schools, and the majority now of the workforce is female in presence. Think about that. Most of the workforce is dominated now by women.
In that same time, the US economy then shifted. Again, this was an intentional move. We're going to put all the manufacturing in the third world. We're going to close Ohio down. We're going to close down the Midwest. And we're going to get rid of blue-collar trades and manufacturing work that men would normally want to do. In today, the economy instead is driven by healthcare professions and food services and nursing and education. By the way, all the things that women used to do in the home. In fact, get this, the number one job of the future, so I'm told by Business Insider, is home healthcare aid. Why do you think that is? Because we have a dying population. Everybody is old and so the number one profession is taking care of old people until they die and vacate all their money and their businesses and everything else. This is not a good sign economically speaking. Right, in turn, throughout all this, manufacturing has been crushed. And along with that, the blue-collar economy as well. And again, this was part of a re-engineering process by the left and by the liberals so that it would crush the middle class.
Researchers point this out, but I find it rather fascinating that the number one factor for starting a family, whether or not a family gets started, is the quality of the man's job. It's almost like Genesis 2:15 is true. It's almost like men should be they should be the providers in their home. And yet, what has happened? They go and they look at the workforce and it's suited toward women. And most men are saying, "Uh, but I don't want to do those things. I don't want to be a home health care aid." But you think about this, if men don't have work, then families don't get started. Again, bad for the economy because of what feminism has done.
Think about this as well because it's tied to the legal question. A lot of people will say, "Well, women are just more suited to the new economy. They're winning. They're smarter. They're just doing a better job adapting." But this actually isn't true. The reality is that there's a legal system that holds a legal gun to the head of workforces so that you get sued to the tune of $80 million if you don't hire enough females. So, women are winning because the system is rigged, literally, in their favor.
Now, there's an interesting book written by Hanna Rosin that kind of summarizes all of this. Hanna Rosin is a Jewish woman, but this is very helpful what she says about the economy. She says, quote, "The blue-collar economy of working-class men has given way to a pink-collar economy that better fits the skills and interests of women, which in turn means that a new American matriarchy has emerged." So, you understand like patriarchy is dying and a lot of the answer is because of the economy. She goes on, "The most distinctive change is probably the emergence of an American matriarchy where the younger men" Think about the dissident right as she says this. "The younger men, especially, are being unmoored and closer than at any other time in history to becoming obsolete." Again, at least by most traditional measures of social utility. And then she complains, "And and so the women are left picking up the pieces." End quote. You see, the problem with this is you can't really solve the whole feminism longhouse question unless you deal with the economic realities that have come about because of it.
So, that's the economy. Number three, the great feminization produced the era of woke politics. Again, the great feminization produced the era of woke politics.
So, it shouldn't surprise us that as cultural institutions across America have become predominantly populated demographically by women that female behavior and more specifically the worst kind like hysteria would become the new norm regulating speech and conduct. So, again, Helen Andrews talked about this last year and she's written on it as well. And this is what she says particularly about the great feminization and cancel culture. Listen carefully to this quote. She said, "Cancel culture is feminine because all cancellations are feminine. Cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field. That is the great feminization thesis. Everything that you think of as wokeness is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization. The explanatory power of this is of this simple thesis was incredible. It really did unlock the secrets of the era we are living in. Wokeness is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently." End quote.
So, you think about this, this actually makes sense. The tipping point for when most or many institutions in America became predominantly female happened around 2012. Well, what else happened around 2012? That's when Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and wokeness, and the Me Too movements all started to gain steam. All right, that's not accidental. That's just basic demographic research. Wokeness is simply what happens when females gain demographic dominance. Again, it's a it's an important problem. So, that's why John MacArthur was right when he said that women need to go home. That's part of the solution to what we've seen with wokeness. Nobody wants to say that, but it is the truth.
Number four, the Jewish revolutionaries made a long march through the institutions. So, as politically uncomfortable as this may be to say, it is actually quite obviously true. You can Wikipedia most of this information, and you'll get the same details. Revolutionary Jews played an outsized role in the Bolshevik Revolution, sexual revolution, civil rights movement, abortion, pornography, and the cultural Marxist revolution in America. And you don't have to take my word for it. I actually have an expert on the subject. His name is Dennis Prager. And he's a Jew, and this is what Dennis Prager said, quote, "Every ism except for Nazism was founded and or led disproportionately by Jews. You name it, Marxism, humanism, socialism, environmentalism, feminism. Jews. It is the Jews. I'm telling you. This is the reason that I have such problems with Jewish life." End quote.
Thank you, Dennis Prager. Very helpful. Likewise, a female Jewish reporter she was a deputy opinion editor at Newsweek in 2025 at a conference spoke about her frustration that Jews were no longer welcome on the political left because anti-Zionist leanings had taken over. And this is what she said about the subject. The thing that makes this so appalling is that Jews built the left in this country. We built the labor movement. We wrote the New Deal. 70% of the lawyers who worked on civil rights cases were Jews. Here the end of the quote. Listen carefully. Her words. Her words, not mine. She says, "We have been at the forefront of every liberal and leftist issue in this country in the 20th century." End quote. And so, of course, this is true and it's just a fact that we need to reckon with, especially politically, if we are to make headway in the country.
So, consider the leading intellectuals of the left and how much damage they've done to America. And you can just go through this list. Look them all up. Number one, Herbert Marcuse, father of the new left, and from the Frankfurt School in Germany. Theodor Adorno, leading light of the Frankfurt School. He brought critical theory along with others to America. Wilhelm Reich, father of the sexual revolution. Sigmund Freud, father of psychology. Edward Bernays, Freud's nephew. Father of modern advertising, especially the use of sexualization to sell product. Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan, maiden name Goldstein, mothers of feminism. And, of course, Karl Marx. Karl Marx, father of Marxism. And we could ask, what do they all have in common? Of course, the answer is obvious. They were all Jewish revolutionaries.
Here's the reality that we have to face. Jewish revolutionaries have been doing what's best for them and pushing unfettered immigration and abortion and many other evils. Unfortunately, what we need to realize is what's best for them is not best for Christian America. This is a Christian nation and we must learn how, politically and economically and otherwise, to assert a Christian will for the country. It's time that as Americans we started doing what's best for our people.
Number five, the sexual revolution swept the nation. So, this one is somewhat obvious, but it finds its roots, sexual debauchery does, at least in the French Revolution. Under the writings of the Marquis de Sade, it's an important name. If you follow the sexual revolution, almost everyone in the movement will cite Marquis de Sade. So graphic and violent and repulsive were his violent sexual fantasies that from his name we would we derive this term sadism. It comes from his name. He wrote many pornographic novels including one titled 120 Days of Sodom. Right, you need only imagine how horrible that is.
These writings would later inspire Wilhelm Reich, father of the sexual revolution, as well as feminists and many within the Frankfurt School in Germany. Now, in America, people like Gloria Steinem would carry the torch, as would a man named Alfred Kinsey. Most people have probably heard of that name. He called himself a sexologist because they wanted to find a better word for moral degenerate. It was Kinsey who modeled his Kinsey Institute on one of his mentor or heroes, which was Magnus Hirschfeld, who had started the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. And even today, the transgender movement will cite this, that Hirschfeld's clinic was one of the first transgender clinics, if not the first, in the world. Now, Hirschfeld himself was a transgressive homosexual. That was the title given to him, who ran the first transgender clinic until it was shut down by Nazi stormtroopers who shut down the building and the practice and the distribution of pornographic material.
But another problem arose because when the Nazis came to power, the Frankfurt School was forced to move out of Berlin. And so where did they go? Well, they went to Columbia University in New York. Why was the sexual revolution so important in America? I want to ask that question. Why was it so important for it the de-Christianization of America?
E. Michael Jones writes this, quote, "As history would show, the sexual revolution was also the first step in the revolutionary takeover of American society during the 1960s." The logical conclusion of this is also clear. "The total sexualization of a culture would mean the total extinction of the influence of religion on public life." Right, you sexualize the culture, you destroy religion. And he goes on, "destruction of the classical state based on the moral law. It would mean that sexual revolutionaries like Reich and other Jews would then have a free hand in spreading revolution, which as the French Revolution and Plato's Republic both showed, invariably led to tyranny and draconian forms of social control." Again, so this ends up being a pivotal battle front is sexuality. It's why we spend so much time talking about William Gouge and biblical sexuality because it does deeply matter that our people understand what a man is and what a man is for and what a woman is and what a woman is for. All of this has been turned on its head because of the sexual revolution.
Number six, education was weaponized to destroy Christianity. I think Pastor Madden did a phenomenal job talking about the importance of content and context. Hopefully you get a flavor of the importance of educating your children as Christians. Because here's the reality, the Marxists certainly understand the value of your child's soul. Right, the reason they came to this conclusion was because the Marxist revolution had happened and many students of the movement saw its failures quite clearly. And one of these guys was Antonio Gramsci, who was an Italian philosopher. And so he started evaluating the movement and said, "Why is this failing in Russia?" And the reason it failed, he argued, was because the souls of the people were still Christian. How inconvenient for the Marxists!
So, Gramsci reasoned, quote, "If Christianity was the heat shield of capitalism, then to capture the West, Marxists must first de-Christianize the West." End quote. And so what he did was he proposed a form of what was called cultural Marxism. And what he aimed at was the weaponization of institutions for the sake of Marxist revolution. You see, what he realized is that it wasn't just the state that you had to capture. You had to capture the media. You had to capture children's education and then separate that education from the parents. You know, one of the first thing that the Marxists did in Europe was introduce sex education in early education. Right, going back to the sexual elements and the importance of that as well.
So, Gramsci would write this. He said, quote, "The state was everything. Civil society was primordial, or so we thought as Marxists. Yet in the West, there was a proper relation between the state and civil society. And when the state trembled, a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The state in the West was only the outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks." End quote. And so the Marxists and the feminists would capture the education system as well as the media. Again, their stated goal, you know, Adam read that quote, I think from the earlier 20th century yesterday. If you read Horace Mann or any of the humanists, you get into the 20th century, the people who built the education system in America, at least public education, they will all do the exact same thing. They will tell you exactly what they're trying to do. They're trying to subvert and steal your children. You have to remember that the left reproduces in the classroom, Christians in the bedroom. They don't reproduce there. And so, what is their goal? They steal your kids. And so, I would plead with the fathers here especially, don't let them do that. Leverage the content and the contacts so that you have your children's time and their hearts. Right, feminists and Marxists won because they captured the education system as well as other social institutions. That's why if you bring up feminism today, you know how many churches I've been in, and you mention how evil feminism is, and Christians get upset with you? Like, I thought we were supposed to be Christian feminists. How many times have you heard that first wave feminism was really great? From Christians. Right, we need to be educated about the true history of these things and understand the plot and ploy of the Marxist left. The goal was always the de-Christianization of the West by subverting particularly the morality of youth.
The other funny thing to me, the Marxists all said, "We should target young white women because they are the most easily manipulable." So, fathers, what are you going to do about that? You just keep sending your daughters to a Bolshevik university. And you hope it turns out all right. You send her to Washington, D.C. to work among Sodom on the Potomac. And you say, "I hope it works out." Fathers have a responsibility for the education of their children in particular. Again, I would just encourage you, protect your daughters and your wives.
Number seven, the church failed to hold the gates. The church itself failed to hold the gates. Instead, the only gate holding they did was to hold them open for the barbarians. Right, you look around this is And yes, this is about the PCA. And so many reformed denominations, these men who say they belong to the tradition of John Knox. And they're offended at the words of Zack Garis. Which are quite innocuous. Right, this is what has happened to the church.
I would encourage you as well, we do have a copy of Zack's book, Honor Thy Fathers. If you want to know what biblical sexuality from the reformed fathers actually was, he's got a great book at the New Christendom Press booth. And you should read that. And you should read it with your wives and your children. What we have to realize is that so much of the sexual theology of the church today is relatively novel. It's post-1960s or post-1980s. And most of it is bad. Most of it was a halfway house to appease other feminists. This is where George Gilder comes in. We've replaced in the church William Gouge with George Gilder, and we are worse off for it. Right, because of the compromise, we have women of both sexes in all sorts of church leadership positions. And that female modes of behavior dominate the church. And yes, again, see the PCA and what's going on with so many pastors there right now.
I want to give you just one example before we close of this. And this is of Tim Keller. Right? So many people like don't understand this. Tim Keller started the Gospel Coalition along with D.A. Carson, John Piper, some of these other guys were involved. But Tim really for the longest time was a bellwether in the church. And he would read a lot of stuff and he would say a lot of stuff behind the scenes. And then other pastors would follow and most of us would see what was going on uh, in say the Gospel Coalition. We'd say, "I don't understand." Well, it's because they always had an agenda. You didn't know about it all the time, but they always had an agenda. So before he died, Tim Keller put some of his agenda to paper. Which is fortunate for us because now you can expose the evil works of darkness. So Tim was a pastor in the PCA for a long time in New York City. Again, he would, you know, decry, you know, the married life. Don't don't make an idol of marriage and family. But let me tell you about the glory of singleness. And why did they do this? Because all their people are single. Do you know how expensive New York City is? Right? They just played to their leftist liberal mostly female audience. But he wrote before he died The Decline and Renewal of the American Church. And in this manifesto of his, he laid out what he said was the path of success for the church as he saw it. So I'll go through at least two parts. You can find the PDF online if you search for it. And it's worth reading at least to know what the enemy is up to. Again, it's helpful to know what Saruman was doing all those years. Number one, Tim Keller said this, "The church must distance itself from what he called fundamentalists."
And you think, "Wow, they sound really dirty and bad, don't they?" Of course not. Most of us would probably gladly take that label. But he is really talking about us. So, Keller goes into this and he says, "Yeah, we need to distance ourselves from the fundamentalists." By that he and he listed it out. He said, "I mean those who would hold rigid sexual norms." So, like biblical sexuality, for example. Then he said, "I would distance ourselves from anyone who supports Trump." Okay, that would be the majority of white Protestant evangelicals. It's like 81% and I think in 2024 voted for Trump of white evangelical Protestants. Those he he includes also those who oppose social justice and wokeness. He said, "We got to get rid of those people." Like you need to be pro social justice and wokeness if you're going to be on Tim Keller's team. He also said, "We need to distance ourselves from anyone who oppose vaccine mandates or the general government COVID-19 narrative." Right, this is liberal left talk. That's what Tim Keller was about. And then second, he said the church must partner with certain kinds of people. He mentioned egalitarians, so feminists, outright feminists. He said, "They need to be on our team." He said, "We need to partner with those who consider rigid biblical sexual ethics to be misogynistic." And this is my favorite. Tim said, "We need to partner with those {quote} willing to affirm and work with and learn from gay celibate Christians." Right, so to be blunt, Keller who shaped so much of the evangelical world, and I'm not talking about the liberal one. Like this for the longest time, this was seen as the conservative branch. This is the branch that Kevin DeYoung and others have been coming up through. It shaped so much of Christian culture in the church. They saw the way forward Keller did for the American church through liberalization and feminization of the church. Well, it's not surprising then when you find out that Tim Keller was a registered Democrat in New York. And of course he said, "Well, I I have more opportunity to influence the political system there." I'm sure you do because you're part of it. Right? This is an indication, I think, of how badly the church has been longhoused.
Another way that you could see this, if just go have a conversation at His Booth with Pastor David Edginton about white nights and reviling wives. How do pastors respond when women sin in the church? They lose their minds and they throw all their ammunition at the man. Because in their conception, as we said at the beginning, the women cannot be capable of sin or at least it mostly can't be her fault. Right? So, one of the biggest things that we need to see in the church, again, this is why we address these issues, is that we build a church and ecclesiastical body that is not longhoused. It not only means that you need to stop putting women in charge of things, but it also means that elders need to stop letting their wives control the decisions that they make in session meetings or in elder meetings or in deacon meetings. They cannot be ruling from behind the scenes, either. We need a resurgence and a reformation of father rule in the church if we're to see broader victory in the culture.
I want to conclude this way because most of that honestly is pretty depressing. I wrote chapter one. Brian and I were going back and forth. We're writing this together. He read my portion and Brian was like, "I'm just furious." I was like, "Yeah, we can't leave people there, can we?" Right? So, I want to end with a word of hope. Because the situation truly is dire. Yet, we are not called to a black-pilled kind of despair. This is no time for waving the white flag. But instead, like Stonewall Jackson said, this is the time to raise the black flag and to draw the sword and throw away the scabbard. Some of you are going home and you have to make courageous decisions. Some of you, like our friends from Idaho, have to have a direct conversation with your pastor about why he's too cowardly to confront you to your face. But many of us are in a situation similar. Perhaps you need to go home and you need to have a conversation with your wife or your daughters. But one of the things that we need most of all is to know that God will supply the courage for this fight. And so, one of my great prayers for this conference, one of my great hopes is that you would see among all other things that you need a tribe of men to stand with you in the breach. This is going to be a long work across many generations, but we need Christian burrows. We need places where Christians can carve out own space economically and politically and for the church. Brian mentioned this the other day, yesterday during the panel, but this idea of the cave of Adullam. We do not have institutional power presently, at least not very much, not at the broader societal level. And so, we We these caves of Adullam where David and his mighty men can gather in order to form a more meaningful counterinsurgency. We need to build up our numbers and our ranks. We need business owners to start and run companies so that men can work there and not report to Karen in the HR department. We need courageous leadership in the midst of all of this. And so I want to encourage you as you're going home, think about whether you realistically have that where you are. How could you partner with other men to build it? Or how could you join another community, perhaps in your area? Perhaps not.
As I think about all these things, it's interesting because really the fate of the West hangs in the balance. And lately, as in preparation for this talk, I said, "You know what? I'm going to read through The Lord of the Rings again."
>> Okay.
>> Absolutely. Thank you. You can't go wrong. It's The Lord of the Rings. But I love these words from Galadriel, and I would leave them with you. Because this really is true. Your quest stands on the edge of a knife. Stray but a little, and it will fail to the ruin of all. Hear this. Yet hope remains while all the company is true. You see the important point that I want you to take away from this conference is you cannot go it alone. David, this mighty man of God, a man after God's own heart, could not go it alone. And we read in 2 Chronicles, what did the Lord do for David? He sent him mighty men and commanders and wise men. And the men from Tyre came to build his house. And we're told by the word of the Lord that all of this was a sign that the that God himself was helping David. So I want you to see this in all your work, that you need a tribe. You need other men to push the plow forward with you. But more than anything else, those men are a sign of the living God being behind you. God is your helper. God is our helper. And that's why the movement will not fail ultimately. Patriarchy, sexual design, order, hierarchy, all of it is God's design and it will not fail.
Finally, I want to leave you with this from our friend Puddleglum. Right? Some of the the kids, we got kids here, understand me? Yeah, okay. Puddleglum, he's our he's our favorite character because he's so grumpy. Right? When he tells the children, he's like, "I'll make I'll make some food for you. You'll probably hate it. You'll probably get a stomach ache. It'll probably be horrible. It's probably going to rain on us. Nothing's probably going to work out." Right? He's a Marsh-wiggle, which doesn't even sound heroic. And maybe some of you feel that same way. Maybe you feel like a Marsh-wiggle in a big nasty world. And you think, "What can I do about all of this?" Well, in The Silver Chair, C.S. Lewis paints really a picture of what I think is very much a feminist longhouse. Think about this. Prince Rilian is imprisoned in a fake world called Underland. And he's imprisoned by who? He's imprisoned by a wicked witch. Right? She controls him through an enchantress's fire. And so, I want to encourage you, what did Puddleglum do? I want to encourage you to do the same thing. What was the heroic deed that he did? He put his feet in the fire. His little webbed feet. He just stuck them in the fire as the witch was spelling her lies. "Aslan isn't real. The world isn't real." He stuck his own feet in the fire. And C.S. Lewis says the pain awakened his mind and the mind of the children and of Rilian. Some of us desperately need to put our feet in the fire. We've been cowards for far too long. We've had no line in the sand. There's no way that we would confront an elder or leave our church. If they push us out, we just keep taking it. Some of us need to heed C.S. Lewis's advice. Fill the room with a little bit of burnt Marsh-wiggle that the spell might be broken. Right? This is how we will destroy that great witch, feminism. It will start with everyday people like us. I appreciate everything that was said about elite theory. But kind of news flash for most of us, we are not that. I'm not that. But isn't that the greatness of these stories that were told? That even little hobbits or little Marsh-wiggles still play a part in the story that God is writing. So, be faithful where you are. Keep putting your back into it. And remember, as always, as Christ instructed us, let us count it joy to suffer with him for the sake of the truth. And remember, as ever, God is on your side. Amen? Amen.
Let's pray. Father, we thank you so much for all those souls gathered here. We pray that you would give them encouragement this week. That there would be many relationships built. We ask, Lord, especially for those enduring trials and suffering. They feel like Elijah in their own place. Lord, I'm the last one. And so, even this conference and the next few days while they're here, I pray that they would meet other people, that they would be encouraged, and you would be be in assistance of them to help build their tribe where they are. Father, we thank you so much for your mercy and your grace toward us. We pray also for this nation. We ask that you would turn it back to Christ. We know that you are God almighty, and these things you can do, and you call us to pray for in your word. Father, we lift up prayer as well for Zachary Garis. We know he's going to speak in just a little bit, but Lord, in the midst of his trials, would you come around him, even encourage him in the midst of this conference with all these people here, that he is not alone, and we stand with him against the evil and the criticism and everything that he's faced. Father, would you be his God, and you would you, as you were near to Paul, would you be near to him and to each one of us? Fill us with your spirit. Help us, Lord, to zealously do the good works that you have set out before us. And we pray all this in the name of our king, Jesus. Amen.