Life, marriage, and gender are all under attack
According to Matt Walsh, now is the time to fight back against the left's assault on truth and tradition.
Culture critic and writer Matt Walsh argues that conservatives and Christians have been too passive, and that they need to start standing up to the Left’s attempts at redefining objective truth to better suit liberal ideologies and agendas. If they succeed in refashioning fundamental ideas about marriage, gender, and life, the window of opportunity for reversing cultural trends will close soon.
Read on for key insights from Matt Walsh’s Unholy Trinity.
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Lucifer was the first liberal.
Lucifer was the first being to shake his fist at reality and refuse to be bound to God the creator. He chose to love himself to the exclusion of God. It was in this moment that the liberal philosophy was born. It wouldn’t be called this until long after, but the guiding ethos has been the same since the devil’s rebellion: self-worship. The Fall of man occurred because Adam and Eve succumbed to the temptation to grasp for equality with God. At the root of every atrocity committed by thugs and tyrants throughout history is this worship of the self. Deifying the individual is the impulse at the heart of liberalism, or progressivism, and it has been since that first cosmic rebellion.
Obviously, selfishness is part of the human experience regardless of political persuasion, but to view the unfettered worship of the individual as an ultimate good rather than a vice of which to be wary is a dangerous place for a culture to be.
In ancient Greece, prudence, justice, temperance, and courage were cornerstone virtues. The Christian tradition incorporated faith, hope, and love as virtues in which to abide. Within the last several decades, tolerance and acceptance have replaced them all as the ultimate virtues.
Unlike classical virtues—all seven of which call for restraint, sacrifice, and a thoughtful proactiveness—tolerance and acceptance are passive and require nothing more than to do nothing. It’s pseudo virtue that costs nothing. Our lifestyle is not impacted or inconvenienced, and no one’s a hypocrite because there are no standards for others or for self. It’s the path of least resistance.
Liberalism is undermining fundamental aspects of human existence and reality itself with its assault on marriage, sexuality, and life.
God is dead in our culture. He’s been dismissed as unknowable or nonexistent altogether. Humanity has assumed the default apex position, filling the vacuum that God has left. Self has become the religion of the day. The individual is supreme above all things, and no one has a right to curtail or even critique another’s decisions, lifestyle, or to cut in on their time or love or body or personal space. Me, me, me, my, my, my… Mighty Me is king.
Liberalism is playing into the devil’s hand with its ‘Do as thou wilt’ approach to life. It’s implicit, and it’s not new—its roots have been around since the first rebellion. This only works in a society where everything is relative. When everything is relative, even the most basic facts of life can be refashioned. The assault on life, marriage, and gender constitutes the most blatant and dangerous attempt at redefinition. Together, they form an Unholy Trinity that is tearing at the fabric of life itself.
If ever there were a hill for conservatives to die on, this is it. Reality is at stake.
Making infanticide palatable to the public has been liberalism’s magnum opus.
If you ever starting toying with the idea that there is merit in the liberal position, just remember abortion. If you’re wondering if liberalism might be as compassionate as its advocates assert, remember the countless million unborn children who have been slaughtered, sacrificed on the altar of convenience and social expediency.
This is, without a doubt, the most important issue facing our country. It’s a colossal moral failure. There have been large-scale killings of particular groups of people throughout human history, but for the first time, a sizeable group of progeny are being eliminated by their progenitors. Beneath the triumphant, upbeat catch phrases about reproductive rights and women empowerment are the corpses of tens of millions of crushed children.
Abortion is a crucial issue not only because it’s morally bankrupt but also because it is an assault on the value and inherent dignity of human life. If they manage to redefine life itself, all further argument will be effectively flat-lined.
Marriage has become a flimsy joke of an institution, and Christian and conservative passivity has paved the way for its disintegration.
The Supreme Court decision to make gay marriage a constitutional right and the uproarious mainstream celebration that ensued did not emerge from a vacuum. It was the natural outcome of the erosion of the institution and sacrament of marriage.
Just a century or two ago, it would have been beyond superfluous to give a thorough response to gay marriage because marriage was universally considered a union between one man and one woman. It would be like explaining that water is wet. But the cultural shift has been so rapid that there is now a great deal of qualifying and clarifying that is required.
A moral impressionism has led to at least 50 shades of gray between black and white. Formerly distinct ethical lines have become fuzzy enough to question and assault a societal building block as fundamental as marriage. To differing degrees, both legitimization of divorce and gay marriage have made the institution a joke. Divorce has created an ongoing cycle of marriage, rupture, and remarriage that makes wedding vows a farce rather than sacred.
Gay marriage is another litmus test of cultural regression. It’s not quite as new or revolutionary as the gay lobby or its opponents might think. In ancient Greece and Rome, homosexual relations between two men and even pederasty were common. As in the ancient, decadent Mediterranean, the United States is celebrating homosexuality, and, like the ancients, will likely blur the lines between adult and child participation. An appeal to practices of ancient civilizations on the verge of ruin doesn’t make a convincing ideal for our own day.
LGBT and feminist ideologies are ultimately at odds, and one of these days they’ll have to duke it out.
The transgender community and feminists currently march under the same banner of marginalized victimhood, but their fundamental assumptions are diametrically opposed. Feminists assert the superiority of women. Transgenders argue that there’s no such thing as female, objectively speaking.
Feminists have been a central driving force in liberalism, but their efforts are being hamstrung not by the Right, but the gay lobby. The gays and transgender are clamoring for the mic, and feminists are politely standing by. This development is a strange one, considering that a mainstay of feminism has been demonstrating that anything he can do, she can do just as well—if not better. The feminist chafes at the association with traditionally female attire, thinking, domain, or activities; but then, here are these men asserting their femaleness by wearing dresses.
The idea of a female brain is repulsive to the feminist. They’ve coined a term so as to name the misogynistic insinuation that there are differences between male and female brains: neurosexism. But the transgender insists his brain is female, and his sexual organs simply aren’t aligned with that.
For many feminists, a man’s opinion cannot be taken seriously, because he lacks female genitalia and, by extension, the ability to comprehend the harrowing female experience and the accompanying oppressions. Why, then, are the views of someone with a penis, a dress, and a fierce insistence that he is a woman being taken so seriously by feminists?
The transgender ideology is inherently anti-feminist, more so than Islam or Puritan thought. These contradictions are glaring, and there will be a day when feminists and LGBTs come to blows over them.
The problem with feminism is less with its goals and more with the belief system undergirding it, which has demonized men.
Walsh concedes the limitations on his critique: he is not fluent in the gender jargon, he’s never watched The Vagina Monologues, and he is a man. Still, there are some basic historical facts that should be revisited.
Most conservatives would say that they support some form of feminism that is not foaming at the mouth and angry. The initial efforts to procure women’s suffrage and a more capacious, versatile presence in the public sphere were good efforts, but the train flew off the rails around the 1960s. It’s since become increasingly shrill and aggressive. This is the conventional wisdom among conservatives and some moderates. The truth, however, is that the absurdities and nastiness that is manifest in our own time was baked in with the first wave batter. It’s not a twisting of good intentions, but a natural, logical progression of the original ideology.
This is not to say that important changes for good haven’t occurred as a result of feminist efforts, but from its conception as an “ism,” feminism has had family and religion in its crosshairs. One of the matriarchs of feminism, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, argued that the Bible and the Church were the two biggest obstacles to female equality. This was not in the 1960s. Stanton died in 1902. She helped stir up the first wave. Even then, the game was a zero-sum fight between man and woman, husband and wife, and nothing was more evil than dependency.
The goals were admirable and some of them were needed. The system of thought that fueled the movement, however, lead to a deep suspicion of and even anger toward men.
The best way to counter liberalism’s onslaught is to defend objective truth.
The case has been made here that the three-pronged liberal assault on life, family, and gender has succeeded through the repudiation and suppression of objective truth. This culture war has not been much of a fight. Liberalism has raped, pillaged, and plundered its way into political, legal, and cultural convention. Given current trends, the liberal vision will turn a foothold into a stranglehold.
It’s one thing to offer diagnosis and prognosis. It’s easy to critique, but to create a solution or suggest a remedy is imperative.
What’s to be done? If repudiation of objective truth is responsible for the unraveling of our cultural fabric, then it makes sense that defending objective truth is part of the reclamation of what’s been lost. Ostrich tactics never won a war of ideas. Bad ideas must be countered with better ones, falsehoods with facts.
What is truth? A big, important question, but we can get closer to it by ruling out what truth isn’t. It isn’t determined by what is fashionable or what can be cleverly crammed into 144 characters. It isn’t determined by emotions—however sincere or strong—or by any individual or herd’s imagination. It isn’t determined by political fiat, or a two-thirds majority in Congress, or by the will of the mob. Truth is eternal and knowable through reason and revelation. Defending the importance of freedom, equality under law, and the dignity and rights of all human beings as stipulated in the country’s founding documents is vital. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are historic affirmations of God-given worth and freedom. We have to stop being so apathetic about the truth. We must overcome our fear of rejection and marginalization. Christians have been in that position throughout its beautifully ancient, epic history. The lack of zeal among Christians and the Right more generally is nothing short of tragic.
Obviously, those who believe that Christ was every inch the man and God he said he was know how this story ends: evil and suffering will be vanquished, and there will be a glorious feast for those who accepted Jesus’ invitation to the party. Every tear will be wiped away, and there will be a future of joyful connection with God.
But until that evil-ending day comes, will we be people who tell the truth and stand by it, or will we capitulate to the intimidation of a culture that deifies the self and abhors the very idea of sacrifice? Dostoevsky rightly said that stars are their most brilliant when night is darkest. We have an amazing opportunity to shine in a culture tearing itself apart. As long as there is still a person ready to insist on truth, then that last glimmer of hope remains.
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