Paul Elam’s exposition on the rise of the Christian Red Pill.
Readership: All; Men; Christian Men;
Theme: The Christian Red Pill
Length: 3,000 words
Reading Time: 16 minutes
Intro
Paul Elam released a landmark exposition in his podcast, The Emergence of the Red Pill Christian — 425 Episode 4 (2024/6/21). If you haven’t heard it yet, it’s a must if you wish to stay current on developments within the Christian Red Pill sphere. Elam has used this exposition as a springboard for many of his more recent discussions and interviews.
For the Red Pill record, for doing text searches, for the ease of citing quotations and references, and for the sake of discussion, I’ve transcribed Elam’s exposition below. [Images, links, and section headers added by Jack.]
Transcript
You shall not steal, nor deal falsely, nor lie to one another.
Leviticus 19:11 (NASB1995)
Therefore, laying aside falsehood, SPEAK TRUTH EACH ONE of you WITH HIS NEIGHBOR, for we are members of one another.
Ephesians 4:25 (NASB1995)
Introduction
Hello there, gents, and welcome back to the 425 podcast, calling one and all to Jesus Christ and to the great Red Pill awakening in Christian men. Continuing from last week, I’d like to reiterate some of the more salient points I talked about.
One, in our analysis of the modern church, we find an institution running essentially on two systems at the same time.
Biblical Headship
First, we have the more overt system, the one that everyone openly acknowledges, where all are redeemed sinners, continually falling short but living in God’s grace.
In this system, we are all equal in the eyes of God, created in his image. But even as we’re all equally valued, equally loved as human beings, in our family life, He has provided a hierarchy. It is simple, efficient, and made clear in Holy Scripture.
Of course, the Lord is at the top with the husband and father underneath in submission to God’s will. Then comes the wife and mother, who pleases God by being a supportive, stable pillar of the family, submitting to her husband and serving the interest of her children.
This is clearly outlined in several passages, but this one is my favorite.
18 Wives, be subject to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord.
Colossians 3:18-20 (NASB1995)
19 Husbands, love your wives and do not be embittered against them.
20 Children, be obedient to your parents in all things, for this is well-pleasing to the Lord.
It’s also critical to point out here that this hierarchy isn’t just an expression of divine order. Unsurprisingly, it is also the hierarchy that provides the ideal environment for children to thrive developmentally, realize potential, and grow into stable, well-adjusted members of society. It’s how you produce children far less likely to use drugs, experience teen pregnancy or academic failure, far less likely to engage in criminal conduct, suffer depression or suicidal thoughts. Again, it’s hardly a surprise that God’s way is the right way, spiritually and in every other level of human existence.
Romantic Gynocentrism
I can almost hear you guys out there gearing up for the big “but…” I’m about to deliver, and for good reason. Our Red Pill sensibilities allow us to look beneath the surface of things to see that there is a different, more subliminal system that operates in the shadows, corrupting the divine plan.
We know that that system has its own separate rules and calls for a very different hierarchy, placing women at the top with everyone else, including God, at a distant second.
Gee, what could go wrong there?
We actually don’t have to ask what could go wrong. The Bible tells us over and over of the unmitigated disasters that result when men follow a woman’s lead, when women, due to men’s desire for them, are placed at the top of the hierarchy. Even a cursory examination of what transpires in the modern church contains the same. This subliminal system, of course, is romantic gynocentrism, which is what happens when human infatuation is co-opted and codified into fantastical expectations of men that were established a thousand years ago, not by God, but by women of high stature. You can learn more about that in a talk I co-authored with Peter Wright, linked in this post.
It’s enough for now to say that it’s a system that preys on our instincts to protect and provide for women or normal gynocentrism and uses them to live out a fairy tale narrative where women are the center of the universe, where they can do no wrong, and where the onus is on men to give them whatever they want, no matter how trivial and no matter the cost. It’s a system that turns infatuation, that time in life when human judgment is most impaired, into a compulsory ethos that rejects the divine order. We tell Christian men they must lead, then turn around and pressure them to cater to their women’s childish whims at every turn. The only thing more stunning than the raw hypocrisy of this hopelessly mixed message is the self-deception in the people who attempt to live by it.
The harm all this causes is nearly incalculable.
The Failures of Romantic Gynocentrism
Marriages based on romantic service to women generally aren’t sustainable. Those unions were held together artificially for a very long time by the stigma of divorce and the social pressures to avoid it, and legal obstacles to divorce. Once those pressures and obstacles were removed, though, marriages based on romance began to fail like stock in Enron, with women leading the charge and dragging the family into the meat grinder of the family court system. The result has cut a wide swath of destruction into the human social landscape. Why? Because failed marriages become failed families. Failed families become failed societies. Take a look around you now and tell me I’m wrong.
Marriages based on romantic service to women aren’t sustainable on their own because they are ridiculously unrealistic. It’s “Happy wife, happy life” — a term coined into the common lexicon because it reflects our knowledge that displeased wives are likely to be vindictive and punitive; in other words, abusive with their husbands. It’s a term that informs us again of the true seat of power in romantic relationships and how injudiciously that power will be wielded. By the way, I’ve heard as many Christian men parrot the “Happy wife, happy life” trope as non-Christian men. Maybe more. For my part, I think this absolutely insane, not to mention unchristian, power dynamic between the sexes is ultimately the main cause of the bitterness that Paul clearly recognized in his epistle to the Colossians.
I could deliver you a lengthy talk on all the downsides of romantic gynocentrism, but suffice it to say that every psychosocial factor by which we measure the well-being and development of children suffers under its profound influence on human behavior. And no wonder that’s true. What should we expect from a set of rules that demands women be granted unreasonable and unsustainable deference from the very men that God Almighty tasks with leading them? It’s a ready-made power struggle that’s happening all around us, and it leaves more men worried about surviving the rigged game than leading anyone. But you’re hard-pressed to find men anywhere, including the church, that would look you in the eye and admit that this is a battle that men regularly lose. Those same guys run around introducing their wives as “the commander-in-chief” or “my better half”. They actually act like it’s kind of a joke when they say it, like with a wink and a nudge, though both labels are sadly and entirely accurate.
That’s the romantic ethos. Women and women’s sensibilities rule the roost. No excuse for noncompliance. And if there is noncompliance, well, “If Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.”
If Mama ain’t happy, those around her, especially husband and children, will suffer. That’s the universally understood state of the romantic end game, even as it is a clear threat of emotional terrorism if there ever was one. [For reference, see Dalrock’s essay, Threatpoint (2012/4/14).] And it points to the real seat of power in millions of families, that no one ever wants to talk about. And they don’t want to talk about it because that power is not just limited to the familial. It gets expressed across all levels of human society, including, sometimes especially, the church.
Institutionalized Gynolatry in the Church
Last week, I addressed the way that churches go into a gynocentric panic whenever divorces happen, with clergy and church leadership siding with the woman and blaming the man by default. They are frequently impervious to facts and logic, and indeed show little interest in either. Telling them that they are unwitting instruments of evil won’t shake them out of their denial, but it would be no less true for it.
Remember the line from Leviticus 19:11 I opened with, the parts about stealing, dealing falsely, and lying? When there is a conflict between a man and a woman, “When Mama ain’t happy”, the church frequently becomes a willful enabler and amplifier for all those sins. It opens the door wide for deceit and incites persecution.
Incidentally, I just finished an audiobook by a theologian, Dr. David Edgington, titled The Abusive Wife, which documents all of this in painful detail. I highly recommend the book, with a couple of caveats that I’ll go into when I interview Dr. Edgington in the near future [Episode 5]. [The 425 Episode 6 contains a review of this interview. A summary of this interview was published on Gynocentrism (Paul Elam): Romantic gynocentrism and the reviling wife: Reflections on last week’s conversation with David Edgington (2024/7/6).]
Anyway, I’ve said all that to say this. Christianity, as I understand it, isn’t compatible with romantic gynocentrism. They are two diametrically opposed ways of operating. To embrace one means the surrender of the other. As Christ said, “You cannot serve two masters” (Matthew 6:24). In the Christian way of life, there is only one true master, the Lord God. In the romantic ethos, Mama is the master served by the man. All the denial and mental gymnastics in the world won’t change that.
Romantic Gynocentrism is Tyranny, Headship is NOT
I suppose it’s obligatory to say at this point that recognizing men’s Headship of the family isn’t a prescription for men to rule over women as a god. It’s not a license for “My way or the highway.” Men are to lead families with the family’s well-being in mind, not as tyrants or oppressors. But even as I write these words, I’m also obliged to point out that in forty years of working with men and women, I’ve run into very few men who would be tyrants. I could probably count them on one hand, two at the most, among thousands of people. So, while I feel compelled to point out that the Biblical duty of leading a family isn’t a license to practice abusive control, I also have to acknowledge that I only feel that way after sixty years of gynocentric propaganda telling the world that the male family tyrant is the default setting for men. My lived experience, though, is just the opposite. Four decades of working with people confirms that the overwhelming majority of family tyrants, those who see their desires as edicts for the rest of the family, were women driven by the romantic ethos.
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve counseled men who expressed an intense, even desperate frustration that goes something along the lines of “No matter what I do, it’s never enough. She always wants more. She’s never satisfied, and never happy. Somehow it’s all my fault.” These are men wearing themselves out on the perpetual hamster wheel of romantic gynocentrism, ever trying to mold themselves into something their wives will love and approve of.
And to these tyrannical wives, this is the natural order of things. She is there, ordained by God to be pleased, not just loved, not just provided for, and not just protected, but pleased. Even in her most childish desires, which is just another way to say “in her lusts”, or “in her sin”, and until she “gets her way”, she won’t hesitate to emotionally terrorize everyone around her.
I don’t take pleasure in saying it, but the fact remains that this is the default setting for how women lead families when the family is bound by the romantic ethos. Romantic gynocentrism — it’s how we make sinful children of women, and patsies of men.
The Coming Cultural Clash
Does anyone really believe that this is God’s idea of marriage? Well, as it turns out, countless Christians believe that very thing, and they stand ever ready to align as useful idiots with disgruntled Mama in her sinful vindictiveness toward her husband for his inability to honor an impossible contract. This arrangement now infects the Western Christian world like a plague, and of course, marriage as an institution only continues to fail.
Where this leaves Christian Red Pill men seems clear enough to me. I think it’s most helpful to view this as a coming cultural clash — one that needs to happen.
In mainstream Christian culture, we see the veneer of Christianity practiced, but little of the heart of it. Underneath the professed piousness and feigned sanctimony, we, meaning Red Pill men, can see the elevation of women to levels that can only be called sacrilegious, and men competing with each other, sometimes viciously, to keep them there. They disregard scripture each and every time it comes into conflict with the corrupted romantic script.
The modern church is a culture that blindly encourages marriage, even though the church abdicated responsibility for marriage to the state ages ago. And even though, in its current state, marriage is much more based on women’s romantic and material ambitions than on the creation of a family. And with its’ failure rate, it’s become a broken industry producing incalculable misery and horror, especially to men and children, but to women too. Despite this reality, the culture of the modern church continues to mold young men into romantic clay pigeons, forbidding them to even think about self-preservation, then launching them into the line of fire with raucous applause and celebration.
The needed response to all of this is already happening in the culture of Christians who happen to be Red Pill men. As churches continue to alienate men, sending them through the exits in droves, the Red Pill Christian community is growing. There is an emerging culture of Red Pill Christian men who see and understand things that the modern Western church is willfully blind to. Men who understand that love doesn’t mean building a candy store for spoiled children to visit whenever it suits them. We are men who understand that the romantic ethos has led to unqualified evil, a rot infecting the very heart of the church. We are men who not only understand that it is better to live in the corner of an attic than in a home with a contentious woman (Proverbs 21:9; 21:19; 25:24; 27:15), but also heed other words from the Apostle Paul, when he said, and I quote,
32 But I want you to be free from concern. One who is unmarried is concerned about the things of the Lord, how he may please the Lord. 33 But one who is married is concerned about the things of the world, how he may please his wife.
1 Corinthians 7:32-33 (NASB1995)
Take from that whatever you like, but it’s hardly ambiguous.
The Apostle Paul didn’t ignore the warnings of the Old Testament about life centered on women. He knew why Adam fell from grace, and David, and Samson, and Ahab, and Solomon, and he apparently saw the same problem with his contemporaries, or he wouldn’t have written what he did. 2,000 years later, and we have the same problems on steroids, with the modern Western church fully complicit in the problem.
Personally, I think it’s time for a new church, at least a massive overhaul of the current one — the one that exists to keep Mama happy. And I think it’s already happening. Online, I hear the voices of Christian men changing, edging towards The Red Pill.
Conclusions
18:00
The Red Pill Christian is slowly rising into the social landscape, and that’s an idea so potent that it borders on frightening. I think it’s only a matter of time before men will start speaking up within their churches, challenging the witch hunts triggered by a woman’s pointed finger, speaking the truth to his fellows, and rejecting the idea that marriage should be modeled after a childish fairy tale.
I’ve no idea if that will bring on the needed change in the church, but what I know of men tells me that if it doesn’t, they’ll just start building a new one. After all, if you’re a believing Christian listening to this podcast, you’re in church already.
[End Transcript]
Jack’s Commentary
For those of us who have been following the Christian Manosphere for a while, you’ll recognize that Elam’s treatise pulls together all the major points concerning chivalry, gynocentrism, and the current state of marriage that were uncovered by the greater authors of the Christian Red Pill 1.0, e.g. Dalrock, Deep Strength, Paul Elam himself, Σ Frame, Larry Solomon, and Peter Wright, et al.
Elam expects that Christian Red Pill men will gradually leverage change by increasingly stepping up and speaking out within their respective churches. I’m not sure how much this is happening, but I think, not much. From what I’ve heard, men are more likely to leave a gynocentric church for another that already has a long track record of maintaining an institutionalized Headship, such as Orthodoxy.
We’ll see how it goes.
Wishing you the peace that surpasses all understanding and the very best of life’s blessings.
Related
- Aaron Renn: Making the Case for the Manosphere (2025/9/26)
