Greetings one and all, Paul Elam here with Episode 2 of The 425 podcast, first and foremost calling all men to Jesus Christ, King of Kings, the Lord of Lords and the absolute grand master of self-improvement. I’d also like to offer my deepest thanks for the incredibly positive response to episode one. Your kindness and encouragement meant the world to me and has further energized and inspired me to put even more into this podcast.

On a personal note, I was attracted to the story of Jesus long before I ever became a Christian. I discovered that attract of all places watching the movie Jesus Christ Superstar with friends when it was released in 1973. I was 16, and wanted to see it because all the Christians were complaining about it as blasphemous. I was surprised when it turned out to be a deeply emotional tribute to His life and death. It stuck with me for a long time and called me to consider the man Jesus. Indeed the play became my all time favorite, and even during all my years of atheism I was deeply impressed with and moved by the story.

It’s funny. At least a dozen Christians in my youth tried to reach out to me, trying to lead me to salvation, and I don’t remember any of their faces or anything they had to say about Jesus, but I never got that movie out of my mind.

That is just support for the idea that human beings are actually creatures of story. That is to say our very identity and our path in life are a continual expression of the many stories that shape our existence. Stories aren’t just the telling of past events with dialogue and imagery. They’re not just products of the human imagination. They infuse our existence. We are, each one of us, the vital protagonist, navigating the plot, or rebelling against it, authoring twists and turns as the story carries us through life. Stories are the basic wiring for what we call humanity. This, I believe, is why Christ so often spoke in parables, which of course is just another word for stories.

Consider Matthew 13, verses 34 and 35 from the New American Standard Bible, 1995

“Jesus spoke all these things to the crowd in parables; he did not say anything to them without using a parable. So was fulfilled what was spoken through the prophet: ‘I will open my mouth in parables, I will utter things hidden since the creation of the world.'”

Clearly Christ had a divine understanding of the power of story, of its integral role in human consciousness. Again, He says, “I will open my mouth in parables. I will utter things hidden since the creation of the world.” I’m no bible scholar, but that sure sounds like promise of powerful revelation. Christ not only knew that stories were powerful, He also knew how much they shaped the destiny of each and every human being.

For instance, part of the story that lives through me is the story of America, it’s rebellion from Great Britain, it’s people taking up arms and fighting the greatest military power in the world, winning independence and going on to become a beacon of liberty and opportunity around the world. Part of that story is its repeated sacrifice to rescue a European continent bent on self-destruction. It’s also a story of egregious mistakes, like slavery, imperialism and many illicit wars. All these things play a significant role in the identity of every American born into the American narrative. It makes some of us proud, some of us entitled and arrogant. It makes some of us feel blessed, and some feel cursed, some patriotic and some seditious. And some, most perhaps, a complicated combination of all these things. But whatever the result, you cannot deny the power of the story of America, for Americans and for nearly everyone in the world.

The same is true about the story of Jesus Christ. Try as you might to deny it, His story holds great power in the minds of nearly all people. Indeed, you can’t even speak the name Jesus to anyone and not get some kind of reaction. The mention of his name inspires jubilance in some, aggravation and hostility in others, condescending dismissiveness in others, and still fear and avoidance in others. It can make you instant friends with some and alienate you from others just as quickly. In fact, one might say that there is no such thing as indifference, no true indifference, to the name of Jesus to anyone steeped in western culture. That’s how powerful and influential, how alive the story of Jesus is.

And with that powerful story as a foundation, we also build upon it with many other stories taken from scripture. Not just the gospels, but the entire Judeo-Christian story of mankind. The bible, at its most fundamental level, is a collection of stories that shape our understanding of human spiritual history, and especially of human moral failings. These are stories that teach us exactly where and how we fail as human beings in the sight of God.

Starting with Adam and continuing through his lineage, we see human beings given one chance after another to get things right, and we always screw it up. Once more with feeling, we ALWAYS screw things up. And, according to the bible, one of the most common ways that men screw things up is by rendering things to women that were only intended to be rendered to God. Things like worship and obedience. From Adam to Sampson to Solomon to Ahab to David and even to Herod, biblical men fell like dominoes due to obedience to women over obedience to God. They rejected the commands of God in order to be foot servants to the commands of women. All failures, all blue pill men of the day. Those failures led to destruction, and do to this day. Even as you listen to these words, that catastrophic moral failure with women has subverted the modern church, turning it into a social gathering, where platitudes and heartless recitals of scripture uttered from the pulpit barely disguise the masochistic, submissive deference to women that is actually practiced wall to wall in the church.

Depending on what story you’re living that chivalrous deference is manly Christianity, or just flat out simping. I know where my vote is.

Understand that I’m not just talking about the modern clergy’s cowardly silence when it comes to scriptural directives for women’s in the church, or the hierarchy in the covenant between God, Man, Woman and children. It’s much deeper than that.

It’s been said many times that the safest thing any clergy can do from the pulpit is to bash men and fawn over women. It’s an undeniably true statement that says as much about the congregation than it does the clergy. A pastor or a priest, after all, is just another character with a role to play in the story being lived out by the congregation. And these congregations are not just in churches with trans and pride flags hanging from the eves. You can see the same story in every denomination, from Southern Baptist churches in rural Mississippi, to the Unitarian Universalists in the deep blue locale of southern California, to the most breathtakingly ornate Catholic basilica in the northeast. All very different churches, worlds apart, with the same unacknowledged rejection of God’s will in favor of kowtowing to women.

I’ve seen the results of this many times over in the men I’ve worked with over the years. Many of those were men who faithfully attended and supported their churches financially. They served as elders and deacons, taught bible classes and devoted themselves fully being good, Christian men. But when those men rejected abuse from their wives, or suffered the effects of parential alienation or false accusations, their churches turned on them. Their pastors or priests advised them to man up. To love her as Christ loved the church. To take the abuse with their heads down and their mouths shut.

The church body that had been so supportive of their marriage now embraced the narrative of the wife, circling the wagons around her socially, protecting her and being dismissive and accusatory of the man. In all of these cases, truth didn’t matter. Abuse didn’t matter. Even children suffering church approved and facilitated alienation from their fathers didn’t matter. The damseling to the congregation, the well placed tears, the exaggerated display of feminine vulnerability, all combined to invoke one of the most powerful stories of all time.

We’ll call it the story of romantic chivalry. And, good sirs, it’s the story being lived out across western society. Churches are not only not immune, they are one of the primary examples of how the romantic narrative undermines the morals and values of its practitioners. Although the story itself is very complicated, it can be broken down into very simple terms. It involves a dragon, a damsel in distress, and, as the story lives in men, a fearless knight on a white stallion, poised and ready to die in order to protect every hair on the fair damsel’s head. Ready to take on every possible threat with no thought at all toward your own well-being.

“Well, that’s all well and good!,” some men will say. “Real men protect women,” they’ll chant, just as their role in the story demands. But there are two very important things these men fail to comprehend about the story requirements. One, the woman need not be a moral, truthful or even morally decent human being to play her role. She only has to play the role of the victim. Indeed, she can fully destroy a man’s life with lies, rob him of his assets and turn his children against him without ever being out of character. The world won’t even notice. And two, the moment you decide you won’t play the role of the fearless, and yes, mindless protector, you will instantly assume the role of the dragon.

It’s an unfair, arguably evil arrangement, but it does appear to be a remarkably effective way to keep men serving the interests of women, even as it corrodes and corrupts the social structure.

All of this happens despite the fact that the holy scripture is nothing if not a series of remarkably succinct, repetitious warnings to us to not follow women’s deceit into chaos. But it seems to happen every time. When a marriage in a church body goes south, the weakness of men across the board is exposed as they heap shame and blame on the husband, signaling their virtue to anyone watching.

Let’s call it the Jezebel Effect. A woman cries foul, sheds a tear and tells her sad story. Everyone in her carefully selected earshot accepts it as though it was the gospel, and reacts by lining up in the modern church’s version of pitch forks and torches to go after the man. I’ve talked to several men personally who’ve been through this exact scenario. The pain it caused them challenges my ability to put it into words. Suffice it to say that being stabbed in the back by your wife, then having your church family help her twist the handle, is a one-two punch that’ll a put the strongest of men on their back, quickly. It’s devastating. And it’s totally, completely evil. Yet it flourishes in the west, both inside and out of the church.

So, where did all this corruption come from? What do you imagine is at the root cause of the Jezebel Effect? Well, as you might guess, it’s another story. It’s the story of romantic chivalry. And it saddens me to say that to the modern western mind, it’s a story more powerful, more compelling, more influential, than the story of Jesus Christ, or of the important stories that precede him in the holy bible. Mind you, that’s a statement about the western mind, not about the story of Jesus.

I will follow up on that next in Part 2 of this talk (conclusion) where I’ll explain why red pill men are the church’s only real hope.