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Radical Conservatism

Conservatism is valuable until it radicalizes. At that point it becomes tradition focused.

“So then, brothers, stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter.”
2 Thessalonians 2:15

“See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ.”
Colossians 2:8

The problem with any ‘genre’ of Christians, (liberal, conservative, Anti or what have you) is the fact that at some point the label will supersede God. Meaning: Conservatives will put defining conservative characteristics above God in importance. Liberals do the same. And this is what we mean by becoming radical.

A Radical individual places what he believes above God in importance.

Conservatives will place tradition and liturgy above God, forgetting that God is the very Being we are worshiping, not tradition. Liberals will place emotions above God, using worship service as a chance to get a “spiritual high” from a theatrical performance based “service”. Obviously God should be placed above everything: tradition, emotion, liturgy, performance and especially SELF.

The subsequent problem with all genres of Christians is the fact that they are viewing their ideas as the most important items, rather than God. Preserving and protecting the labels becomes the goal for these individuals. People strive to preserve their conservatism and neglect truth as a result. .

The defining traits of a radical conservative are highly apparent and include the following:

Resistant to progression or change of any kind.
Resistant to positive or happy emotions, choosing rather to focus on negative emotions such as death and the thought of eternal destruction.
Blatant Self-Righteousness.

Conservatives believe that positive emotions will cloud the judgement of man and cause him to make poor decisions. Emotions will lead us to think that the status quo is just fine, when God clearly commands us to improve over time (Romans 12:2, Ephesians 4:22-24).

Conservatives tend to acquire an inflated sense of self-worth and as a result become self-righteous unless they are extremely careful in guarding themselves against it. They tend to minimize topics such as grace, because the liberals twisted the grace of God to the point where they no longer think they need to take action. Conservatives want to avoid that at all costs, knowing that a faith without works is dead (James 2:20).

Conservatives tend to focus on doom and destruction.

The inevitable death and punishment of man approaches and is constantly on their minds. Continual focus on negativity is unwise and breaks down the mind. It is unwise to constantly have negative thoughts festering in your mind without a productive use for them.

One problem that results from a conservative’s hyper-focus on works and a minimization of grace is the false idea that they have somehow “made themselves right with God”. There is absolutely something to be said for man’s role in his own salvation (Phil 2:12), but we also cannot minimize the importance of grace and the fact that we are lost without it.

This was not an exhaustive list of the conservative traits, but it gives the most common traits that you will see. Looking above at these traits from a detached, objective perspective, you can see that they can become problematic if left unchecked. Each of these characteristics can grow out of control. These ideas also become problems when they depart from the actual Word of God. Minimization of grace is a departure from scripture. Fixation on death and destruction is a poor evangelism technique.

Do not Place anything above God. You are a Christian before you are a conservative. Force your ego into submission. Be a Man.

Mantra

To be labeled is to allow the mind to die.

Application

First, be sure to understand that we are avoiding RADICAL conservatism, not conservatism itself. Remember from earlier that an individual is radical if he puts his personal beliefs above God in importance. So in this section, we are avoiding the tendency to put the traditions of man above God in importance.

Again, the foundation for defeating radical conservatism is awareness. Whether you are liberal or conservative, you MUST be aware of the downfalls of your “genre” of Christianity. Do not place the characteristics of your personal religious leaning anywhere above God in importance. Avoid attempts to preserve tradition at the expense of God. Do not focus on hell at the expense of the souls of others.

If you ever place anything above God in importance, you have just radicalized.

Your masculinity is diminished by radicalization, so this must be avoided at all cost. A radical man refuses to think for himself and blindly holds onto his current beliefs. You need to develop the mental wherewithal and humility and recognize your personal biases and then manage them properly.

Reject radical conservatism immediately, it is a problem. It promotes isolation and mechanical, superficial worship and interactions. It can cause individuals to develop cult-like behavior. The Church already has the reputation for being cult-like, make sure you are not contributing to that unsavory public image.

Conduct Yourselves Like Men.

Guilt

Before Reading this article about guilt, it may be helpful to read this article about using your emotions. We are not trying to divorce emotions such as guilt, but learn how to use them properly.

“And he touched my mouth and said: ‘Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for.’”
Isaiah 6:7

Guilt is grossly overused in Christian culture. Not the good type of guilt that causes men to change, but the purely emotionalistic guilt that boys love to wallow in. It it weaponized by demagogues, People complain of “feeling guilty”. Simple pew warmers believe that guilt itself is necessary for change or repentance but this is not totally accurate.

Guilt may help catalyze repentance at times, but it is not absolutely necessary.

Liberals overuse guilt, as they do any emotion. They think that emotional “feelings” are necessary for growth and change, though very few liberals ever grow spiritually. They certainly grow more emotional over time. Emotional growth is not what we are pursuing as men.

Conservatives overuse guilt, stating that it is the foundation of change. My first question is: “What would a conservative know about change?” The label they wear describes how they feel about change – they avoid change by conserving old traditions. Besides, guilt is not in the “steps of salvation”, that highly promoted conservative arguing piece, so it can’t possibly have any relevance for them (slight exaggeration).

While guilt may be helpful for moving men to change, it is not necessary.

The only thing that matters is our actions.

Guilt is irrelevant if we do not change ourselves and our actions. We can have all the emotional, guilty feelings in the world, but without change, that guilt did not matter one bit, nor did it do anything for our faith. You can have all the emotions in the world, but without action, you have nothing.

This faith is based on action, not on how you feel. You have a responsibility to be a man, one of the foundational principles of which is to control your emotions rather than having them control you. You must be firm and principled in character and efficient in action. Only in this way can you avoid the trappings of emotionalism.

Again, this section is not to say that guilt is 100% useless. Guilt does have some use, but not if that guilt is not accompanied with the action of repentance. Men can learn how to repent without emotion and how to repent with the help of the emotion of guilt. Never rely on emotion, but use it if you can.

Mantra

Guilt is unnecessary.

Application

Forget about feeling guilty. If you can change yourself without feeling guilty, then do it. Now there is something to be said about godly sorrow. But again, godly sorrow without the action of repentance is worthless.

Reject every doctrine that paints guilt as a necessary feeling. That is all guilt is, a feeling. Feelings get you nowhere. Actions are the only things that change where you are in life. Want to move forward and progress? Stop feeling, start acting.

However, one acceptable form of guilt is anger. If guilt is going to be an emotional feeling, then the best emotion would be anger. This is because anger is useful for destroying old behaviors. It is a hot emotion that should be channeled towards our own weakness and insufficiency and be used to eradicate it from the face of the earth.

Conduct Yourselves Like Men.

Sacrifice

“Through him then let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name. Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.”
Hebrews 13:15 & 16

We no longer know the meaning of the word “sacrifice”. Parents give their kids money to give on Sunday, as if that teaches them anything. It dissociates sacrifice with pain, which should not be done. If it does not hurt, then it is not a sacrifice, that is what the word means. Giving up money you earned is literally painful. Those kids didn’t earn that money. What they give didn’t come out of money they themselves worked for. How are they supposed to understand the significance of sacrificial giving if they are giving away someone else’s money?

A few years down the road and the parents of these kids are shocked when they discover little Johnny thinks socialism is a viable form of government.

In the Old Testament, men of faith would offer different kinds of sacrifices to God. These sacrifices were usually burnt offerings, where the man would take the best animal of a flock, kill it, and burn it. Do you think that was always a fun thing to do? It sounds expensive. We take for granted how difficult that killing your animals may have been because we merely read what happened, instead of experiencing it ourselves.

Sacrifice is a tool to understand God’s sacrifice for us. Sacrifice is a form of investing, where we trade what we think is valuable on earth for more valuable intangibles such as character, trust or generosity. God sacrificed a portion of Himself on the cross for us because He placed such a great value on mankind. Why this sacrifice was made is a great mystery. God’s sacrifice was not without great pain and sorrow. Our sacrifices are much smaller than that, but they still cause some pain. This is just in the nature of sacrifice. Science has shown that paying bills with cash is painful, activating the pain sensors in the brain.

Some people will reject the idea of a painful sacrifice, because we should be “happy” and feel good and all that nonsense. Those are not Biblical statements, happiness has nothing to do with sacrifice.

Even though our sacrifices are much simpler, they are still uncomfortable. We sacrifice sex with anyone we want in order to please God. Is this fun? No. Some Christian men will try to tell you it’s fulfilling to wait for sex and then have it with only one woman, but they are unconvincing at best. How would they know? They have not experienced both sexual lifestyles to be able to compare them. For this reason, saving oneself for marriage is a great sacrifice.

Giving money on Sunday is a sacrifice, especially if you are giving cash (see above). We can obey the Bible and be cheerful and ungrudging yet still experience the discomfort of giving the money. This is the same principle as enduring the pain of training, but smiling when you struggle because you know that discomfort is where all the change is.

Avoiding drugs is a sacrifice for many men. The weight of the world crushes man from all angles, yet he is charged by God to endure that pain while remaining sober. This is a tremendous difficulty in the life of man.

The Lord requires many sacrifices from his people. Embrace the pain of those sacrifices. Be a Man.

Mantra

All Sacrifice Requires Pain

Application

There are always opportunities to sacrifice money, time, resources and comfort. What you have to do is accept the fact that most of these sacrifices are painful. The Christian life is painful. The sacrifices required in the Christian life are also painful. Accept this pain. Become comfortable with the pain of sacrifice. Look for opportunities to sacrifice and embrace the pain involved.

Rid yourself of the idea that you have to enjoy sacrificing. That is unscriptural nonsense propagated by men who have sacrificed nothing in life.

Conduct Yourselves like Men.

Generosity

Generosity is not what many people in religion have made it out to be.

“In all things I have shown you that by working hard in this way we must help the weak and remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he himself said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’”
Acts 20:35

“One gives freely, yet grows all the richer; another withholds what he should give, and only suffers want. Whoever brings blessing will be enriched, and one who waters will himself be watered.”
Proverbs 11:24-25

“Give, and it will be given to you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap. For with the measure you use it will be measured back to you.”
Luke 6:38

Generosity is a hard concept for many men. The idea of just giving away money to other people is difficult to understand. Why do we struggle with this? Usually because we think other people are unworthy of our help because they are lazy. We assume we are enabling a lazy attitude and lifestyle. Men don’t want to give away the money they worked incredibly hard to acquire to some bum who walks around asking for it. We justify our attitudes by assuming these individuals are manipulating people to fund their alcohol or heroin addiction. While speculatory, this is still a topic for debate. There certainly are “career beggars” and they can do very well for themselves financially.

Men should be generous, but they should also be wise.

We should help others, but we should also be good stewards of what we are in charge of while on earth. To do this we need strategic stewardship. We must maneuver ourselves and our resources so that others use our generosity in the way we want them to, rather than the way they want to.

We have to be realistic, many career beggars are manipulating people out of their money to buy alcohol and drugs. This is a fact of life. But there are also many people who are in legitimate need of help, and now doubt is cast on their sincerity because of manipulating career beggars. We must strategize. We must be generous and wise at the same time. This can easily be done by a Man who thinks.

We must also reject the notion of “Blind Generosity”, which suggests that we should just give money to anyone who asks because that is right. No, that is not right. Blind giving simply eliminates your responsibility to make a character judgement on another individual. The individual who blindly gives away money is mentally lazy, not morally superior.

Mantra

Good stewardship is using wisdom in generosity.

Application

How do we mitigate the risk of generosity? This is simple for our modern lives: make it impossible for people we help to use the resources we give them or anything other than what we want them to have.

Man asks for money for food in the parking lot? Don’t give him money and buy him food or give him a gift card for a restaurant. With a gift card, you have taken money that could be used for drugs or alcohol and made it so that only food can be purchased. This is most easily done by providing gift cards to fast food restaurants that do not serve alcohol.

Another option is to have premade care packages with food and toiletries already made in the car that you can hand out at any given time. This ensures that you are generous while at the same time being wise with your resources.

It really is that simple. Strategic generosity is the way to win. You are no longer a stingy curmudgeon, and you are wise and a good steward. Everyone wins. Be Generous. Be a Man.

Conduct Yourselves Like Men.

Dogma – The Root Of Blind Faith

Dogma is the result of the inability to think rationally.

“Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God; because many false prophets have gone out into the world”.
1 John 4:1

The need to think has long been done away with, especially in religion. While liberalism lives through emotionalism, conservatism thrives on dogma. Blind acceptance of tradition and the rejection of all progressivism is the hallmark of radical conservatives. That is a weak mindset to have.

The weakness comes from the fact that these individuals are so set in their ways of tradition that they do not want to go through the mental labor of thinking and evaluating what they believe.

Do I believe in holding to and preserving what the Bible says? Yes.

Do I believe in glorifying the traditions of man to the point where they are deified? No I do not. That would be just as illogical as liberalism.

Traditional dogma is when conservatives force an overload of rules on you, demanding that they must be followed without question, and threatening punishment if they are not.

The problem is that most people in the Church have no idea what they are talking about, and you can prove this by asking the most simple question in the world: Why?

They say, “Don’t use drugs”. Why not? “Drugs” is too vague of a word? What exactly do you think that is in your coffee pot? Have you tried any to know why they are bad other than the fact that your parents told you they are bad? (I’m not advocating drugs here, I’m opposing dogmatic mindsets and blind faith).

“Save yourself for marriage”, they say. They really should be more specific, because without specific, clearly defined boundaries, kids will push the envelope. Is oral sex before marriage okay? Depends on if you ask a Church elder or Bill Clinton doesn’t it?

Why should we save ourselves for marriage anyways? It doesn’t look like it did your marriage much good. You look just as unhappy and unfulfilled as any worldly marriage. An extremely important question with regards to this is: “If you saved yourself for marriage, how exactly do you know it is more fulfilling than if you hadn’t saved yourself for marriage?” You have nothing to compare it to. So what most people will do here is pull out the few cases of people who have regrets later about not waiting for marriage to have sex.

An important thing to note is that these individuals with regret are only found in the Church.

Less than 1% of all American save themselves for marriage. Therefore, shouldn’t we see a corresponding 99% regret rate? We don’t. Because people are not regretting sex in the same way as the Church preaches. The majority of people who regret having sex outside of marriage are people whom the Church has instilled a perverted manner of guilt into though dogma. They regret having sex because they were told they would regret having sex. It is a “no-cebo” effect.

Dogma is to be utterly avoided, both in learning from others and in teaching others. It should be attacked every moment it presents itself in the Church. Teach and learn through rationality, because your faith is rational.

Mantra

All dogma is for the weak.

Application

Don’t accept what is told to you just because people in the Church say it’s right. You have to “test every spirit” (1 John 4:1). You have to think with your rational mind. Do not preach dogma, do not accept dogma. The Biblical faith is rational and has no need for man made dogmatic, perverted blithering and prevaricating. Be rational. Be a Man.

Write down everything you believe. Start with just one teaching you have heard in the Church, take drinking or premarital sex for starters. You must now “test the spirit” of what you have been taught by comparing it to the Bible.

Ask yourself the following questions about the teaching to weed out dogma in your mind.

Is the teaching I heard in the Church actually found in the Bible (you would be shocked at how much dogma fails this simple test).
If the teaching is in the Bible, is the teaching being used rationally? (Some traditions people in the Church try to force on you based on the Bible simply do not make any sense logically. You believe in an intelligent God who makes intelligent rules. Therefore, there should be logic behind every commandment).
Is this teaching biased? (Could be due to the teachers personal upbringing, opinion or agenda).
What is the teacher trying to get me to do? (Obey God or obey his traditionalist teaching?)
What are the biases of the teacher (Could be political or racial if the teacher is vile enough to pollute the Word of God with them. It could be a personal bias)

You can ask yourself more questions, but this should be enough to clear out most dogma from your mind. Never accept something as true just because someone in the Church said so. Always check them and cross reference what they say. Find out if they are being truthful or if they have an agenda. Then remove as much blind dogma from yourself as you can. You will be a better man as a result of being a rational man.

Conduct Yourselves like men.

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