Building a victor culture to beat the victim culture
Issue #122
It's time to resettle the West.
Renew and reclaim what you can—but it's also time for new churches, new alliances, and new works.
It is a time to build Christendom 2.0.
Or, put another way, it is time to build a new Christian culture.
One way to think of a culture is as the sum total of our attention and achivements. What we focus our minds on, the intentions we have, and the actions that these lead to—these are what build up a culture.
This is true at all levels, whether in a family or church, in a particular subculture, or in a generalized national culture.
Right now, broadly speaking, we live in a victim culture.
Victim culture is what naturally gets built up when people spend a lot of attention on the ways in which they (supposedly) are prevented from acting as they would want, or achieving what they would want
A second way to think of a culture is as the stories that people tell about themselves—the stories they listen to and believe and repeat.
Again, this is true at all levels, and the levels bleed into each other. Higher levels, especially, have a lot of weight due to the sheer number of people involved, and can easily start pressing down on lower levels. The national culture influences the local culture much more strongly than vice versa.
Again, we live in a victim culture that tells stories about strong monsters “out there” who keep us “in here.” This is easily translated to the local and personal level, which is why so many churches and online cultures are so impotent and pathetic. “We can never vanquish those monsters. We need a hero from without to vanquish them for us…and the only way to get that hero to come is to cry out to him about how much we hate the monsters.”
What is ironic is that this is actually the story of redemption. It is the story of Israel in bondage, the story of the world enslaved to sin and Satan, the story of every Christian who cried out to Jesus for salvation.
But here’s the thing…because Jesus is Lord, because Jesus is Savior, because Jesus fulfills every hero archetype, it is a story that is over.
The only cultures that tell this story any more are cultures that do not know Christ.
Christian cultures tell the story retrospectively. In Christian cultures, the strong monsters are defeated, and we are the victors in Christ. Even when the strong monsters are not yet defeated.
This is why victim culture is anti-Christ.
And this is why, without intending any digs at anyone, we really believe that eschatology matters. Consider this helpful primer from Christ Presbyterian Church in Magna, Utah:
A culture that tells the story of defeat, a culture that is convinced it will fail in advance, is a culture that does not believe that Christ, in his death, resurrection, and ascension, has triumphed over the devil, over sin, over the world, and over our own flesh. It is a culture that does not know that we share in this victory, being buried into him through baptism, and raised by the Spirit of Power to newness of life, to be seated with him in the heavenly places.
Christian culture is victor culture.
Christian culture knows that Christ is currently reigning, and currently placing all of his enemies beneath his feet, through his body on earth, the church.
Christus victor!
Victor culture does this:
Conversely, victim culture says, “The problem is much deeper. The state shouldn’t even be involved in libraries. We need to abolish state libraries.”
Oh yeah?
How’s that going for you? What a loser mindset. “Here’s an impossible ideal we have no way to achieve. Let’s sit around moaning about how we can’t achieve it.”
Nah, let’s set a goal we can achieve. Let’s accept that this institution exists right now, and take one step that moves us toward capturing it for Christ.
Focus on small wins. They add up over time.
How to do your own story hour at a local library
Check your library website for meeting room options. If not listed, call and ask.
Be friendly and non-provocative. It's about reading good stories to kids. Most libraries are for that.
Fill out the paperwork. Michael filled out a very simple form. Sometimes it has a cost, sometimes not.
Review the meeting room guidelines. CHPL guidelines say: “Discussion groups studying religious topics are permitted.”
Tell them you’ll be reading some stories to local kids. That’s it. If they push, tell them the truth: You’re reading stories that underscore a biblical message for some families you know—but all are welcomed.
Create a Facebook event. Invite people and ask them to invite people. Michael did his story hour at 1 pm on a Wednesday for smaller children.
Pick a good book with good pictures, and read to your own kids the night before. Michael did James Shrimpton's The King and the Dragon from Crossway.
It will go faster than you think. 15-20 minutes should do it. Bring candy canes or similar to give out afterwards.
If the library says no for some reason, try a different branch.
Don't overthink this. It's easier than you realize.
Only men who can’t fight think that landing shots is all that matters
Building culture is very hard when you are embattled. It’s impossible if you’re struggling to even survive. You need a safe location to work from. A fortified outpost where attack is not a constant threat. A place where thoughtful proactivity is possible, rather than constant reactivity.
This means insulating yourself from blowback. In a victim culture, judicial process is replaced with lynch mobs. If you are identified as a monster, and everyone screams for help simultaneously, what is going to happen?
Having a church that supports your work, rather than viewing it with suspicion, will be critical.
Having hard-to-cancel sources of income will be critical.
Consider what one reader shared with us:
Had literal Neonazis calling my church and my company’s President in Boston about me all week. Also been worried about what people on the left might do with some of my explicitly Christian establishmentarian positions in the past.
Luckily both current church and company that I intend to stay close to value not giving in to mob justice and told callers to shove off.
Now, it’s good to have these kinds of buffers and fortifications in place—but it’s even better not to need them.
In other words, if you’re trying to build something worthwhile, it’s a lot better to do it without provoking your enemies, so you don’t have to build with a sword in one hand a trowel in the other.
Yes, we are in a culture war—so this is not always possible, or even preferable. But there is a time to fight, and a time to build. There’s not always a lot of overlap.
Too many guys seem to think that landing shots is all that matters. It's not. That sort of thinking gets you knocked out—or stabbed in the eye. A lot of our approach to dealing with the culture war, or conflict in general, comes from what we have learned in actual fighting. Michael did boxing; Bnonn did HEMA.
There are three important principles that we try to think about before even deciding to engage:
Hit and don't get hit. It's not enough to land blows. You need to be able defend yourself from the inevitable riposte. You must know how to void, parry, block, countercut. You need to know how to maintain distance and position your body to stay safe—even baiting your opponent into wasting his energy. In HEMA, mutual kills are common among amateurs. “I hit you in the head, I win!” Well, yeah, but you lost your hands doing it. Conversely, you can wear out and break the will of an opponent with a solid defense. In boxing, check out Willie Pep, Chris Byrd, and Pernell Whittaker for examples.
If you're going to get hit, make it a flesh wound. You can lessen the impact of an unavoidable strike by moving with it. In boxing, Bernard Hopkins and Ali are great examples of masters of this. Hits may land—but rarely at full power.
Circle around and choose your spots. You circle to stay out of your opponent’s strongest striking radius. But you also do it to open up angles—hit without being hit. Obviously if you choose to fight, you do have to engage. The key is to engage on your terms. In boxing, a great example of this is Leonard's fight against Hagler.
Guys that swing wildly might get lucky. Guys that erupt in a flurry of blows when provoked can certainly land hits. George Silver, the great English fencing master, commented that there is nothing so dangerous as an amateur. But luck is not a strategy, and anger doesn’t just add strength to your attack—it removes wisdom.
An experienced pugilist will lay out a wildly-swinging amateur every time. Little guys with solid skills can take out a big guys without skills.
As in the ring or the list, so in life. These principles should be applied to conflict of every kind. It’s not just about landing shots. That sort of thinking gets you knocked out. And it’s not just about fighting any battle that comes onto your radar. That sort of thinking wears you out.
Physically, you should be hard to kill. Any self-defense expert will tell you, the chief way you do that is by avoiding fights. Digitally, be hard to cancel. The same wisdom applies.
Realize that we’re not suggesting you should never fight. Obviously we ourselves have been, and continue to be, engaged in conflicts of various kinds. Rather, we are reflecting on the value of some of the conflicts we’ve been engaged in, and developing what we said in our last issue, about avoiding crap-traps, or other fights that don’t actually matter to you. Our advice is not “don’t get into fights.” It is “only get into fights that will help you achieve your mission and build what you want to build.”
This advice is necessary because men—especially young men—are naturally prone to step up to any conflict, and see avoiding it as cowardly rather than prudent. Online, the situation is even worse. There is a faddish excitement that will draw you into all kinds of fights that, when you look back, you’ll realize achieved nothing. A year from now, many men who have dived head-first into the Christian nationalism broohahah are going to realize it was a fad, and regret the time they wasted.
Most churches are unstable
When you are considering the ground you’re building on, and the tactical strength of your position, your church should be foremost in your mind.
In our view, most Western churches are unstable, and likely to soon either wither or impode due to…
Remaining internal tension from COVID/pandemic congregational conflict;
Leadership teams/elder boards working under neutral or positive world assumptions (cf. Aaron Renn’s Three Worlds of Evangelicalism);
Already undisciplined budgets becoming untenable due to drops in attendance and rising overall costs;
Under-supported older pastors without clear succession plans. Over 50% of churches are solo-pastor led, and the average age of pastors is 57. Lack of succession seems to be a mindset taught by boomers, as we discuss in an earlier article:
Some churches will face reality squarely, and make the needed changes. But many will not, and will functionally die. Consequently, most of those congregants will have to consolidate themselves into more stable churches.
This is something to consider now, so you can be proactive about managing it, rather than finding yourself carried along into a messy and protracted saga later. It may be that a fight is coming that you can’t avoid. If so, instigating it quickly—and lawfully; cf. Mt 18—will be much better than waiting passively for it to overtake you.
In the long run, we expect to see fewer churches, but more midsize to large congregations—along with a growing number of house-church-like neighborhood churches.
These churches will be shepherded by effective crisis leaders:
They know that people want to follow bold, decisive, and clear spoken leaders.
They explain the challenges and crises in the larger context.
They look at root causes rather than just symptoms.
They don’t shy away from bluntly describing reality as it is.
They anchor the way forward in reasons for hope.
They possess low reactivity, and are cool as a cucumber.
If this doesn’t describe your current church’s leadership, it’s a good bet your church is ngmi in the long run, and you should be considering strategy to either leave or reform now.
There is a lot of coalition-building that can be accomplished if we don’t allow the emotionally unstable elements in our circles to set the tone and conversation.
Most men need to be more ambitious
You may say, "Scripture warn us about ambition."
Not exactly.
James 3 says, “For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there is disorder and every evil thing.”
Two points here:
To make it clear that ambition is bad, it requires that you use an adjective, a modifier. Same thing happens with the word religion. Religion can be good. False religion, however, is bad. Ambition can be good. Selfish ambition is bad.
Note that there is an associate between selfish ambition and disorder. I like how the Strong’s concordance describes the usage of this word. It says, “disturbance, upheaval, revolution, almost anarchy, first in the political, and thence in the moral sphere.”
Disorder describes a disturbed, a broken order. Generally, it’s the wreckage of something once beautiful and good.
So, yes, ambition of the disordered selfish sort if bad. It’s sinful.
No denying it.
But we also see ambition in Hebrews 11.
These faithful believers possessed a holy discontentment with this world.
They desired, they were ambitious for “a heavenly country” and, consequently, “God is not ashamed to be called their God; for He has prepared a city for them.”
There is such thing as a holy ambition.
Every believer should cultivate and possess it.
We should stir each other up to do great and excellent things.
King Saul conquered surrounding nations and built monuments for himself.
David conquered even more surrounding nations and longed to build a temple for the name of God.
Absalom wanted to be seen as a judge and king in the gates of Jerusalem, and in doing so stole the hearts of Israel. But he wanted their hearts focused on him.
Nehemiah, on the other hand, desired to rebuild the walls and gates Jerusalem—but listen to where focuses the heart of the people. In Nehemiah 4:14 it reads:
When I saw their fear, I rose and spoke to the nobles, the officials and the rest of the people: “Do not be afraid of them; remember the Lord who is great and awesome, and fight for your brothers, your sons, your daughters, your wives and your houses.”
Be like David, not Saul. Be like Nehemiah, not Absalom.
Be ambitious for the Lord’s name. It is good to aspire to great things that glorify Him and are good for your neighbor.
—Excerpted from notes for Michael’s upcoming book, Holy Ambition.
Q&A: How should we accept praise or glory?
A reader asks:
Something I've struggled with my whole life is accepting praise or "glory". Being raised with the typical "give all glory to God" I've always felt deeply uncomfortable when I get praised for my work, feeling either that a) I didn't really do anything exceptional, or b) I need to find some way to redirect the glory to God. But I also hate the cheezy attempts to do this I see in Christian culture, i.e. the finger point to heaven, or the casual "thanks, but God gets the glory" response. I think I'm missing something in my theology of glory that is hampering my ability to accept praise and properly give glory to God. Anyone have thoughts on this?
In scripture, the crown is a symbol of glory and honor—and Jesus promises a crown to everyone who overcomes. In other words, Christ intends for us to receive glory. This makes sense since he made us as his glory (1 Cor 11; Ezek 1).
When men glorify us, if our hearts are right before God, we will rejoice that we have reflected God's glory and been recognized for it. We return that glory to God in worship (cf. casting crowns in Revelation 4; new song in Revelation 5).
There’s no reason to feel uncomfortable with praise for a good job. The best way to get comfortable is to think of praise as a gift, and practice simple gratitude for it:
“Thanks, brother. Glad to be helpful.”
“Thanks. That's encouraging.”
Try to keep it short. Later on, give thanks to God privately.
A clarification of our position on ESS
In our last issue, we talked about crap-traps, and gave the example of the ESS controversy (Eternal Subordination of the Son, also called ERAS, Eternal Relations of Authority and Submission).
This upset some people involved in that controversy. Having reflected on their feedback, we still believe that ESS was a crap-trap—but we want to emphasize that it was a trap laid in ambush, where some men were unable to choose to avoid it entirely.
We also want to be very clear that we are not condemning the men involved as heretics, or any such thing. In our assessment, ESS is not a heresy, though consistently held, we think it will lead to heresy. Many ESS advocates have been unfairly maligned as heretics by egalitarians using this as a proxy to rid the evangelical world of the few men who were willing to fight for biblical sexuality. We are grateful for those men, and for anyone who has the courage to fight for biblical truth—even when we criticize some of their strategy.
Notable
More info here: https://rumble.com/c/FreeNZ
Talk again next week,
Bnonn & Michael