The Appeal of Andrew Tate
Of late Twitter/X has lit up with massive posts about the apparent popularity of Andrew Tate with younger Christian men, everyone lamenting the case, and ascribing the catastrophe to the same cause. That of the church’s descent into feminism, and its leftist shills belittling of maleness. While such factors doubtless weigh on that scale, yet the problem is far greater than that.
Our problem is not only the demeaning of manhood, but it’s something else as well, which isn’t covered in all the chatter on X. It’s not just the demeaning of manhood; it’s the demeaning of Christianity. It’s not just that leftist enemies have misconstrued and slandered the nature of manhood, but that the otherwise true have misconstrued and slandered the nature of the gospel. While everyone’s happy that there are godly warriors on the field flaying the woke and eviscerating their hatred for God and the bible, yet we are not quite ready to consider our own failures.
What exactly is that makes Andrew Tate look appealing to the modern Christian young man? Is it because castrated leftists have belittled the testosterone driven maleness that God ordained in gender? A more outspoken voice of validation of who they actually are could certainly be appealing. Except that Tate exemplifies not one syllable of that manly biblical character whatever, but only a completely perverted version of it. Why is it then appealing? It’s appealing because manliness has been belittled, not just by lefties, who belittle who men are naturally, but has been as much belittled by otherwise rightly informed believers who belittle what manhood is spiritually, or Tate would have been pitied, and meticulously avoided.
Had young men been taught true spiritual character from youth, Tate’s profane tongue, conceited speeches, arrogant manner, and lawless advocacy would have disgusted and offended every single young man without exception. Because rather than teaching the spiritual truths that make Tate look like the vain fool that he is, we’ve been 2/3 of that fool ourselves, despite all our soap boxing.
Rather than making the folly of worldliness, pride, debauchery, and conceit, perfectly plain, and shaming it, we’ve fed it to multiple generations as consistent with a Christian walk, and have reprobated the sanctity and self-control commanded in the bible. We’ve fed it to young men (and women) in the form of normative profanity, normative lewdness of attire, normative tattoos, normative godless music, normative entertainment that glories in all the evils we pretend to abominate, and in castigating any appeal to return to what Christianity has always been, lampooning it as legalistic, pharisaical, pietistic, basically calling the entire Christian church behind us heretics. And, Oh… look! Our young men think a tatted profane lowlife is cool. Now how could that have happened? Except that our own failure at walking with God is exactly what has made our young men vulnerable to lost men like Tate.
Tate is a braying ass of a man, and would never have appeared as anything but that, had we done half our job as fathers. He would not have appeared manly, but as a boor, too stupid to be ashamed for himself. The way he trashes women he looks gay, rather than being filled with the admiration of nature for all that is femininity. He’d be a subject for prayer and pity and as a frightful image of debauchery. But we’ve denounced all that debauchery, and then wallowed in it in a dozen ways, and such an example of hypocrisy only proves a powerful poison to the soul of a young man. He watches the pious speeches about sanctity of life, and how sanctification follows justification, and how if there’s no new life then there’s been no new birth… and then observes the degeneracy that entertains you on your television, and all the glorification of sin in the songs you love. He hears your high words about the gospel, but then watched you put him in a school that trashed all of it in a most extreme degree. How important could any of it be, if your practical life is thus ordered? The emptiness of your confession is what will replay in his judgment, and that will be worse for him than the lowlife movies you watched with him.
I have a meme and it reads like this: “Legalism: Noun. The radical idea that the same perversions you decry as gross violations of God’s will, at church, in books, and in political meetings, are still perverse gross violations of His will when you’re enjoying seeing them glorified in music, books, and on your TV.”
You have the likes of Paul Tripp, Doug Wilson, Jeff Durbin, and Mark Driscoll making daft, immoral, and bizarrely stupid apologies for profanity. You have others calling you a cult if you advocate for wearing modest clothing such as any other generation of Christians insisted upon in the entire history of the church. We are left to assume their church started in 1920. Before that everyone was in this cult they’ve kindly exposed to modernity. We have people, while perhaps advocating for decent education, still validating the choice of putting your children into schools run by pedophiles and radical leftists who train them in their perversions and numb them to their atrocities. We talk about Tate’s debauched view of women, but it’s a view we’ve fed our boys for generations in the satanic media engines of Television and Theater. And then complain that they accepted what we gave them.
We have nearly the entire generation of preachers validating an entertainment establishment that honors and worships all that Tate epitomizes. And we then expect young men to take some road we never paved, and avoid the one we did. Because we protested at the last minute. Very sanctimoniously. On X.
I remember a book that used to be given to couples in marital counselling, called “The Act of Marriage”, and written by Tim LaHaye. It was verbally explicit in regard to marital privilege to a degree that was idiotic to have a young couple study together prior to the liberties of the married state, and obviously it resulted in massive failures. But what fool didn’t foresee that? It’s as though a man should pour gasoline all over his living room, and start lighting matches, and then when his house was engulfed in flames, says, “I don’t understand! What happened? Because that’s what we’ve done. We’ve presented a world to our children where lowlifes are the heroes, and then say its feminism that’s destroyed them. That’s like the man starting the fire blaming it on birds nesting in the eves.
Our children simply believed us. But hey… at least no one can call us a legalist, so there’s that. But what will God call you at the last day? So there’s that.
