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This book is a detailed but straightforward exposition on the biblical role of men in the home, church and wider society. It’s a pity it was not published fifty years ago when feminism started infiltrating mainline churches and subsequently almost destroyed the biblical teachings on sex (gender) and sex roles.
Zachary Garris is not afraid to take the bull by the horns and show in a logical, rational and biblical way, why Christendom should be patriarchal in structure and theology. Since the 1960s, he argues, the feminist equality jihad has swept all before it. Initially it was tempting to think that feminism in its reformist zeal would collide with the Bible once too often and it would be challenged and rejected and then quietly fade away. No such luck. Feminist doctrine now shapes to an unprecedented degree the theology and rights and duties that govern church life—even in so-called conservative churches—and in society as a whole.
This review appeared in a recent Quadrant.
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The tendency of postmodern equality thinking has become so rife that it dominates Christendom. It is fashionable to pick out isolated texts and say these prove the new normal. For example, that Galatians 3:28 proves the total equality of men and women; that Junia/Junias was a woman well known to the apostles; that Philip had four daughters who were prophetesses. All these are offered up as proof texts which sanction female ministers/pastors/priestesses (the word priest is masculine). These texts supposedly demonstrate that the roles of men and women in the church should be equal or identical, while those texts which clearly teach the opposite are dismissed out of hand as the opinions of the culturally bound and chauvinist St Paul.
Garris believes what he calls the “complementarian” position is flawed; not only does it ignore biblical teaching, it also ignores the testimony of history. In order for a teaching to be orthodox (biblical) it needs to be shown that this teaching has always existed in the church and has been the standard practice in the church universal. Female pastors/leaders/elders were never accepted as orthodox and it’s only since the 
1970s with the rise of postmodernism coupled with Marxist-inspired feminism that egalitarianism has been so triumphant in modern Christian thinking.
In modern times Christendom first caved in on Darwin, many churches accepting Darwin’s theory of evolution and that therefore the Book of Genesis is mere allegory. Then came the successful feminist demands for female ministers and now many denominations are pushing for the acceptance of homosexuality within the churches, not only to be members, but as pastors and teachers. Many denominations now are also more concerned about saving the planet than they are about saving souls.
The patriarchal structure even in modern egalitarian times is still surviving, but only just. But one wonders for how long, given the plethora of affirmative action policies in favour of women and girls. The fact that males dominate society for the most part should not concern us at all as it reflects the natural order of things. Even in the animal kingdom males dominate, but in life there are exceptions such as female prime ministers and the matriarchal structure of elephant herds.
Professor Steven Goldberg argues in his invaluable book The Inevitability of Patriarchy that in every human culture known to us, patriarchy is the norm. He gathers evidence from many sources to show institutions that have been observed in every known society and suggests a universal explanation. The institutions he examines and says are universal are patriarchy (men dominating higher positions), male attainment (activities which provide higher status are related to male physiology) and male dominance (cultural expectation of male leadership and control).
Modern society has shifted from being patriarchal to being almost totally matriarchal. Men for the most part have acquiesced in their own downfall, having been cowed into submission by the onslaught of a massive feminist campaign convincing them that unless they fully support feminist demands for equality, they are guilty of sexism and the enslavement of women. As David Thomas rightly points out in his book Not Guilty: In Defence of the Modern Man, “It is not often that a dominant class legislates its own downfall with quite as much thoroughness as the parliaments of the western world, filled as they are with men passing equal opportunities legislation in favour of women, have done.”
Today it appears that, in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.” Laws and policies are constantly being passed in favour of women, not only in the workplace and the political arena but also in the home. In divorce, property settlement and sharing custody of the children, women are often given preferential treatment. Men can be falsely accused of domestic violence so women can obtain exclusive custody of the children and receive more in government support. Often fathers are denied access to their own children, even if the claims of domestic violence are not supported by evidence, and forced to pay maintenance.
Women can now obtain an abortion up to the time of delivery and the child’s father has no power of veto. Even in courting, men must be very careful. On some US campuses, a man must obtain written consent.
Today all sorts of policies, especially in the political and educational fields, make it difficult for men to exercise their natural dominance. Just to name a few, the Labor Party has a 40 per cent quota for women to be selected for safe Labor seats, women are given preference in selection for courses in traditional male fields of engineering, science, law and medicine—despite the fact that there is no corresponding push to get men into traditional female fields, and that two out of every three graduates are female. Preference for females is rife in the workplace, with many government and private employers featuring females prominently in advertising, and in their hiring practices. In advertising, men are often shown as buffoons while women are depicted as smart and sassy.
Women have formed their own football and cricket leagues, funded by the men’s teams and competitions. Even in the military, all fields are open to females including combat roles.
There is not one field of human endeavour which can now be regarded as masculine, or indeed as feminine, so is it any wonder there is so much confusion about roles for men and women? As a former British prime minister once said, “Once a woman is made man’s equal, she becomes his superior.”
Given the stranglehold that the notion of sexual (gender) equality has on current society and policy-making, for men trying to live by the principles enunciated by Masculine Christianity is going to be very difficult. I do hope the book is widely read and supported.
In chapter six, on “Hierarchy and Authority in the Created Order”, Garris argues correctly that exceptions do not prove the rule, nor should they be used to subvert the natural order of male headship. However, the vice-like grip complementarianism has on Protestantism and contemporary society is very strong.
Masculine Christianity will not be popular in many churches. Even conservative churches, while preserving male eldership and male pastors, will feel challenged as they have females leading worship services, have female deacons, or have women assisting in communion. Nor do they raise objection to men being subject to female bosses in the workplace, or men and boys being slowly pushed to the margins of society—all of which Garris says is against the biblical mandate for male leadership and authority. These are the roles God has mandated for men. Society is besotted with total gender equality and in rebellion against the teachings of the Bible.
The Bible issues a warning to us all. It speaks of those people who did many things in the name of Jesus including performing miracles and healing the sick; but in the words of Jesus, “depart from me, you evil doers”. Garris is right to argue that the Bible is not for picking and choosing what parts we will obey and what parts we choose to dismiss such as male headship. The Bible is never outdated; Christians have a solemn duty to accept it all, and obey it.
Masculine Christianity
by Zachary M. Garris
Reformation Zion Publishing, 2020, 296 pages, about $30
Alan Barron is the Victorian State Director of Family Voice.
I pointed out to a well-known, very intelligent Australian man that while male and females have the same average IQ, the males’ are more highly varied resulting in men being over-represented in the geniuses and also in the idiots.
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He replied “so obvious when it is pointed out”.
I read somewhere else the same but the average women is smarter than the average man, in my local area the illiterate men are allowed extra time to take forms home for their wives to fill out for them.
I’ve always considered the ancients realised that a societies survival relied on the fecundity of its breeding stock and that men are expendable to that end. But on the other hand monogamy was essential to maintain such a society in the long run, reducing inbreeding and fatal competition for chief inseminator.
Perhaps there is a remnant memory for that time in human prehistory that maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA shows us that our species can be traced to less than 100,000 women.
Ah hindsight. Some of us are just bigger idiots than others….there are enough apples on that tree for everyone.
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I once worked loyally for a guy that was a Mensa , although he was one of those people of a brilliant nature, he wasn’t full of himself. He had the most dynamic, varied and interesting senses of humour….in the words of Archbishop Anthony Fisher…” I’m not sure that he was the intellectual equal of his Wife”, however what went unsaid was that he nevertheless loved her……or what mattered most is that they loved each other passionately …….they lived and fed off each other…with a philosophically Christian outlook ……without worldly philosophical abandonment.
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Ps…there is such a thing as an Angelical Hierarchy and there is a good reason for it!
Oh Dear……..I did the same thing again.
If there were awards for decades of compellingly sound writings in support of sense and civilization, Alan Barron would assuredly have a Victoria Cross, a knighthood, and an Oscar. Nevertheless, I must seek to persuade Allan to adjust his perspective on feminist-directed discrimination. In reality, the feminist agenda is at least as much discriminatory against normal, natural women as it is against males – indeed, it is overwhelmingly males , not females, on whom the feminists have depended to advance their agenda. It is salutary to consider the natural rights of genuine women and their children which the feminists, and their male acolytes, have scorned to recognise.
– The right of a woman to have her husband be sexually faithful to her (and, incidentally, her duty to be sexually faithful to him), and not to take off with another woman. My observation has been that the feminists welcome any situation which causes the break-up of, or introduces conflict into, a family or marriage, regardless of what the wife or female partner involved thinks or wants. They utterly scorn the natural desire of healthy girls and women to have happy, stable marriages and family.
– The right of a woman to have a child, or a further child, when a husband or male partner is against it. Has anyone ever heard of a feminist campaign to support women against bullying by husbands, male partners, or fathers to have an abortion? Or of any feminist denunciations of husbands or male partners who violate women’s reproductive rights by getting vasectomies without their wives’ or female partners’ consent?
– The right of women to raise their own children full-time to at least primary school age if they so wish, and to have government financial support to enable them to do so. For decades the feminists demanded that government child support take the form only of subsidies for child-care centres for the children of wage-force women; however, from sometime in the 1990s the agenda was modified. The feminists decided that wage-force women should be conceded a government stipend to be full-time mothers for the first eighteen weeks of their babies’ post-birth lives; and they persuaded Tony Abbott’s government to legislate accordingly. Yet to ensure that the “right” to this stipend was not extended to loser-women who were not committed to the wage-force, the feminists, and therefore Abbott, decided that the stipend should be limited to women who had been in remunerative employment for at least one day per week during ten of the thirteen months preceding the birth. This grossly discriminatory scam was lyingly titled “Paid parental leave”, even though applicants did not have to be employed, and thus did not have to be in a position to take leave, at the date of giving birth. Abbott’s successor as Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, further gratified the feminists by abolishing the non-discriminatory $500-per-child baby-bonus for all women which had been introduced by John Howard, and which the feminists had always vehemently opposed because it was not confined to wage-force women. What wonderful advances for women!
– The right of children to be raised in a stable. loving and enduring natural family headed by their biological mother and father, married to each other; or, when this is not possible, headed by a proxy mother and/or proxy father married to each other. Has anyone ever heard of a feminist who acknowledges this fundamental children’s right?
– The right of schoolgirls to opt out of the vile gender-mixed sex education lessons in the government schools (I speak from experience) in which the girls are required to participate in discussions of a kind in which they would never wish to engage even with their parents or brothers; and in which “sexual pleasuring”, including homosexual pleasuring, is taught in depth? Has there ever been a feminist demand that school-girls be conceded the right to opt out of this sort of degrading conditioning, intended to impress on them that they have no right to practise modesty or have it respected by boys, and that they should regard private parts as public parks? Yet if a male student tapes inside his locker-door a bikini-girl picture, girls are entitled – as they should be – to have the school make him remove it because it embarrasses and demeans them.
– The right of women and girls, if they so wish, to be addressed by the honorifics “Mrs” or “Miss”, rather than by the feminist-mandated “Ms”.
– The right of wives and daughters to have their husbands and fathers spared in employment from discrimination against them in favour of women. After all, when a husband or father is discriminated against, so too are his wife and daughters.
Much, much more can be said about the selectivity habitually exercised by the feminists and their male groupies under the pretence of advancing “woman’s rights”. I am sure Alan Barron will agree.
A superb analysis, Colin. As a former feminist and daughter of a feminist, I awoke late, but just-in-time to the tyranny of feminism. You have articulated the injustices that occur when power is deceptively presented as wholesome when, in fact, it is simply totalitarian.
Is it you, Alan, or Zachary, or both of you, who espouse the view that the rot set in when churches “caved in on Darwin, many churches accepting Darwin’s theory of evolution and that therefore the Book of Genesis is mere allegory”?
My reading list is long, and I would be reluctant to bump up a book whose author began with the proposition that Genesis records the literal truth of creation, or that the universe is 6000 years old.
I’ll say one thing for those who assert the literal truth of the whole of the Old Testament, however, and I am not being facetious, their view is a wholly consistent one.
Ah, Sindri, you should be careful what you place your faith in. Should it be in what the “Settled Science” tells us to believe? Even if it has been supposedly settled for a century? Is “The Science” infallible? Incorruptible?
Today we are expected to believe in the settled science of “global boiling”. Two years ago it was “safe and effective” experimental novel genetically engineered inoculations. The science was so settled on those that people were forced to choose job or jab. It takes a lot of faith to believe in “science” as settled as that. . PS: I have ordered Garris’ book. It will be at the top of my (already impossibly long) reading list.
The proposition that “the science is settled” is almost an oxymoron, I agree. It’s like saying “the hypothesis and prediction have been supported by experiment, so the theory is unchallengeable”. It’s nonsense, it’s surely contrary to the scientific method. It’s like the complacent understanding of the physical universe in the late 19th century, that Newtonian physics explained everything, and there was nothing much left to discover. Quantum physics blew that away not long afterwards.
That said, I’m neither a physicist or a geologist, but I accept the view that Genesis is not a sound physical explanation for the creation of the world or the universe. I hope you enjoy the book.
Colin J, thanks for your sensible enumeration of rights that might be desired by wives and mothers and their female children. As you accurately suggest, much of second wave feminism trashed these much desired rights in favour of women working in the male arena of employment. That may have been fine for middle class women who had assistance in the home, but it was a tragedy for others, who had just escaped from the drudgery of cottage piecework and then factory labour, to be ideologically forced out of the house just when the husband was at last bringing in a wage that could support a family.
The rights lost are familial rights, the right to form and nurture a family within a preferred relationship of male as the primary breadwinner and female as caregiver, at least for the early childhood period.