In sales, when you have to sell a lemon, and you know it’s a lemon, and the buyer knows it’s a lemon, then as a salesperson you must re-craft the story for the second sale. Bad products require a good story, and one that gets told and re-told often. How else could Coca-Cola make an entire nation obese and continue to sell the same product without relentless marketing? How else could Bud Light sell a watered-down tasteless slop without funny ads that convince children it’s cool? With a good story, and one that is constantly updated, no one has to feel like a fool for buying it the first time, or the thousandth time. The trick is keeping up the smoke and mirrors so that the buyers feel “in da club.” People don’t want to admit, undo, or take action against prior bad decisions, so a fresh, shiny story helps re-affirm a poor choice. An ever-changing, shape-shifting narrative is essential to this strategy. Rather than feel stupid and admit something is a bad product and bad choices were made, we just modify the story. Surely, the crafted story will insist, something just wasn’t quite right the first time around. This time it will be better. This time, the bugs are fixed. Version 2.0 is improved. The installation was done incorrectly. The product wasn’t tuned properly. This time, the springs won’t break and the bottom won’t rust out.

The first time a terrible idea was bought happened in the Garden of Eden. Eating the fruit, it was said, would make the people like gods, but it didn’t. So this was a bad sale. It was a faulty product. It was a bad sale, based on a lie, for a product that couldn’t deliver what was promised. The fruit only led to sin. If the devil had been a vendor on Amazon, Eve would have written a one-star review.

But the devil is a relentless salesman, with an apparent quota and target number, so he comes back with new pitches for the same old awful product. Since we are humans, and curious, and because we hate to admit that we are suckers, we give him another chance. In re-crafting the story, he returns with something of interest, something different than a fruit, to sell us the same rotten garbage.

In modern times, a reverse Garden of Eden happened, where for men, women became the fruit. Consuming her would make men like gods. The same Fall happened all over again, because when you eat from the tree of knowledge instead of the tree of life, you get sick. Instead of loving, respecting, and supporting women, through sickness and death, for richer or poorer, until death do us part, men opted for quickies and no responsibility. But we did not become like gods. We became estranged from them because we forgot that they are the crown of creation, the finishing touch on this world. We became islands instead of joined together with them. And because of this choice, many men became divorcees, isolated in apartments, separated from our wives and children in broken homes, lost because we or our parents bought the lie that monogamy and chastity could not make us happy, when it is only virtues like these that can ever make us happy, because they bring us closer to God.

When men stopped believing that they are joined in the flesh with their wives in marriage, they stopped leaving their families and cleaving to their wives. I don’t think most men today have even heard of the “leave and cleave” idea. I certainly hadn’t. No one ever gave me a “leave and cleave” sit-down chat, because most people had forgotten it, or never heard of it. The TV certainly was not teaching it. If anything, the TV was shouting for divorce and birth control. There are so many stories of men coming drunk to their weddings in the 1970s that it is no wonder the state we are in, since treating the Sacrament like a bachelor party invalidates the ceremony.

This is why American culture is dying. But this is not a bad thing in its current form. You can tell which way a nation is heading by whether it leads its citizens toward God or away from him. If cultural practices and laws attempt to block or silence God, then God will indeed withdraw from the nation. God’s grace is available, but when media and politicians actively put up smokescreens, God will allow it. He’ll just pop up later once the chaos ensues and say, “Here I am.” The only thing a culture can do to God is attempt to hide him, but his Presence punches through regardless to those who he calls. And as for our faltering society, which is bent on self-worship: it’s not much of a culture to speak of anyway when the American centerpieces are money and power (which we mis-label “liberty”). The pitch, demonstration, and sale of Americanism has played itself out. The shiny product of Jeffersonian Democracy turned out to be a lemon, just like the fruit in the Garden, and the only thing propping it up for the past 250 years has been Christendom. The last days of America will be chaotic, because that’s the exact result of life without God.

The funny thing about this attempt to normalize and celebrate immorality is that it just brings us back to an old familiar place. The next generations will come to know the same conditions that made the world ripe for Jesus and the Apostles to change the world, and perhaps the most radical thing of all that was preached was chastity.

Chastity is not a flaw in Christianity. It is one of the main reasons why early Christianity took off. It is self-denial, not self-affirmation, that frees us from slavery.

In the birth of Christianity, women led much of the charge. Starting with Mary Magdalene at the tomb, women are first to find the risen Jesus, before the stubborn and fearful men do. Like Mary Magdalene, they lead men to faith, or like Eve, they can easily lead men away. Why? Because we want women and follow them. Women tend to find the meaning of Jesus before men, and this is how millions of men end up in churches to this day. Rest assured that many men are in the “sexist” church on Sunday under orders from their wife. They are rousted from bed to get dressed for getting to church, because women often understand Jesus and need for a savior more readily than men.

The sanctity of marriage was real among practicing Christians in the first centuries, and still is. In the Roman world, marriage was a joke, as it is in secular America now. No-fault divorce is one of most anti-Christian developments in the Western world, but it is nothing new. Jesus admonished his own people in his own time for disrespecting marriage. Whenever I hear that “Christianity doesn’t respect women,” this is a statement that is a naked rejection of facts from history and the story of the gospel. My own college history textbook stated that Islam treated women with more respect. The main thing I learned in college was “Christianity Bad,” especially for women. But reading the history of the Church, that doesn’t fit at all.

I mean, the thing is, you actually have to read. You cannot just ingest a video from a YouTube influencer who hates the church because his uncle was mean, or nod at a modern academic’s portrayal because he had to pick a thesis on Marxist theory that would get accepted by the humanities journals.

The Church was led by the Apostles, but it was filled by women. It’s worth noting that the creation story follows a pattern, where the “formless void” from the very first sentence of the Bible has a three day period of making a form, of construction and architecture, and the second three day period fills that “house” with beings. The Church was a formless void, which needed structure first, and then it had to be filled with people. Pentecost is the “let there be light” moment, and the structure of the Church is then formed in the shape of the Apostles, who appointed bishops and ordained priests. But a church of merely bishops and priests would be a empty and lonely place, just as the creation of galaxies and stars and planets would be boring without something living in the void. A beautiful church has an architecture and form, but without people inside singing and worshipping, what’s the point? For the same reason, outer space is boring because there is nothing in it. Only the stars make it interesting. The same goes for planets, where a rock spinning in space without life is nowhere we want to visit. Empty churches are great for contemplation of God’s greatness, but solitude is not the primary purpose of any Church.

Now this is important: notice that once God completes the first three days of architecting things, and after filling the earth with plants and animals, he creates man. In the first chapter of Genesis, he creates man and woman at the same time, but in chapter two, there is a critical thing to notice about how he completes and caps this great project of creation. The last thing created is woman, like the finishing touch on a great work of art. In other words, all of the architecture of the first three days, and all of the creatures and things in the second three days, including the man, Adam, are incomplete without the glorious master stroke of God in creating the woman. This is important to understand, because if Jews and Christians hated women so much, then why is the crown of all creation Eve, a woman? The problem we have is that we don’t venerate woman nearly as much as we should, and anyone that misunderstands the veneration of Mary in the Church is missing this point, that womanhood and the gift of motherhood and marriage are utterly sacred parts of humanity, the likes of which we cease to exist without.

You have to ask yourself a few things.

If the Church hates women so much, then why was the early Church inundated with women converts?

If the Church hates women so much, why did so many women in the early Church want to have a Christian husband?

If the Church hates women so much, then why was marriage to one woman for life so important to men of the Church?

If the Church hates women so much, then why did women get to participate in Christian worship, from the beginning, when they didn’t get to in any other religion?

If the Church hates women so much, then why are they involved with so many parts of administration and education at churches?

If the Church hates women so much, then why are so much of the liturgical calendar days every year dedicated to women saints and martyrs?

If the Church hates women so much, then why do we have so many saints that are women?

An answer to all of the above questions is simple. The answer is that the Church does not hate women.

The idea of complementarity is anything but hateful. It’s reality and it respects women far more than second and third wave feminism ever did. First wave feminism was just the secular re-assertion of what the Church had already been teaching, but obviously men had failed women terribly in practicing it. What the Church teaches and what people actually do in life rarely match up. That is the case today, too. The later stages or “waves” of feminism were all about abortion and divorce, at which point the Church must part ways, since the goals from the 1960s onward did not deal with human dignity, but rather centered on the blessing of murder and adultery. Jesus was against those things, and it wasn’t popular to say so when he was alive, nor is it today, yet it must be said. The modern stage of feminism, like stage four cancer, is pure delusion. The great irony today is that men wearing women’s clothing have moved in and hijacked the ship of feminism because the ship shifted from Platonic, Aristotelian, and Christian ideals over to Sophist, Enlightenment, and Marxist ideas. This is how all good things fall apart. In case you wonder when and where the shift happened, it’s easy to spot. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a Christian, schooled in a seminary, steeped in classical philosophy and she had a healthy fear of God. Betty Friedan was schooled as a Marxist and God was nowhere in sight.

This is the most modern story you can tell, because this is the story of America as it sheds God’s graces and runs with Lady Liberty’s hair flowing in the breeze as she rushes into the arms idolatry of the Self and the State.

The difference between Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Betty Friedan is that the former was arguing for “The Truth” and the latter was arguing for that slippery and shape-shifting serpent known as “My Truth.” It’s literally Socrates against the Sophists all over again.

What Betty Friedan really meant to say was this: “Men failed women.” And she was 100% correct. Betty Friedan was correct about come things, and wrong about everything else. Personally, I crush on Dorothy Day. Because Betty saw birth control and smashing men as the cure for society, as the panacea for the yearning of the bored mother and wife. Yet now women have all the opportunities of men and the yearning continues, but is worsened into a gnawing because of the degraded state of motherhood and marriage. Dorothy Day saw the errors of Marx and came to believe in the beauty of motherhood and marriage. Betty saw childless careerism as the solution because she was an unhappy Marxist (and I’ve yet to meet or read of a joyful one).

Truly, it’s ironic how these two women passed like ships going in different directions. Dorothy Day started with an abortion and had two marriages, only to find Jesus and the Church. She then proceeded to feed a million homeless people and restore thousands of families to health. In contrast, Betty Friedan had one husband and one family, but her ideas advocated for divorce and abortion and led to more broken homes than the family tree of Genghis Khan.

The thing about “The Truth” as opposed to “My Truth” is this: Imagine a man standing in a pool that is just deeper then he is tall. He has two beachballs, one large and one small. “My Truth” is what you see him holding above the water, but underwater he is desperately trying to keep the other ball, the giant inflated beachball, between his knees, so that it doesn’t pop up and reveal “The Truth.” It is an awkward state to be in, because it takes so much work and struggle to pretend that “My Truth” is “The Truth.” This is why people who see Christ for who he is are so relieved. Augustine saying, “My heart was restless until is rested in Thee” is the admission of the man in the pool who has stopped trying to keep the giant beachball submerged and pinned between his knees. It’s a relief. For goodness sakes, even finding Socrates is a start if you can’t find Jesus yet. Read Plato, today if you can, and then the Gospels, if you can’t quite stomach the miracles.

Men stopped treating marriage as a covenant, and Christianity became a joke. But this all goes back to sin being blessed and allowed in the culture. The heresies that deviate from Catholic teaching is the root cause, and men were hearing the shape-shifting voice of “My Truth” long before Betty Friedan ever started arguing in favor of abortion and pornography. I could drop a long list of male names who heeded the devil’s voice before her, starting around the year 1500, but I’ll resist the urge.

The other reason why men treat women poorly has a simple answer. It’s actually the same answer. That answer is this: sin is real. And so is the devil.

Fallen men find bad patterns of living, and one of those patterns is the overly macho persona that spawned Burt Reynolds in the 1980s, as he marked the pinnacle of the Playboy era. Today, at the end of macho men, we are naturally rebounding into an excess of macho women.

If you’ve ever balanced tires or watch a mechanic do so, you can see how this happens. If I’ve used this metaphor before, I apologize. When an unbalanced tire spins on the balancing machine, they get violent, and as we all know from Newton, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. To resolve the unbalanced tire, you stop the machine, reset, hammer the weights onto the rim, and restart it. You don’t just speed up the machine and hope it balances itself. It takes work to fix the unbalanced wheel, not just faith. It requires evaluation and action. The mechanic may even hit his thumb with the hammer, causing a little pain when stopping to fix things. But you have to stop the machine or it will throw out the bearing.

We’re nearing that point where the whole machine breaks down because we’re spinning violently and blaming each other when the problem is the lack of balance in our relationships.

If you understand the concept of the Fall of Man, you will understand why we have sin and suffering. If you think that the Church invented sin, or that sin isn’t our fault and came from Pandora’s Box, or that people are all good with no flaws, then you cannot understand Christ. But if you understand the Fall and come to know our own weakness and poverty comes by choice and by our putting evil thoughts into action, you will humbly understand that there is sin. There are two types of sin as well, ones that offend God like lust and greed, and there is also physical sin that causes suffering and pain. We tend to only focus on the physical and mental suffering, while we completely ignore the massive tumor of spiritual sin that weighs us down.

Whenever women are disrespected, as in our modern culture today, we have forgotten that every human is made in the image and likeness of God, the imago Dei, and more specifically, we have taken our eyes off of Christ. We’ve started to sink in the water, just as Peter did. The great question of “Why Did Peter Sink?” that this entire blog is centered around applies to this.

To accuse the Church as being anti-woman is to ignore history as well as Christ’s life itself. Yes, many men in history have disrespected women, but “disrespecting women” is no more of a Church doctrine than geocentrism ever was. Just as Copernicus and Galileo didn’t disprove the faith and morals of the Church, neither has your angry uncle’s treatment of his wife. Disrespecting women is not a position of the Church. It never has been. The fact that the Apostles were men is not disrespecting women, it’s just that Jesus formed his church this way. If he had selected twelve women as his Apostles, then the Church would be structured that way. If you go back to the “formless void” of creation, which is a critical two-word term in the Bible, note again that in creating, God first makes structure and then populates and fills it with living things. In the first chapter of the Bible, we see the mode of creation that God uses, which is to architect and build the house, and then he fills the house with plants, animals, and people. Whether you believe in 6-day Creation, theistic evolution, or even atheistic evolution, we all know that the world was created before living things filled it. Whether you believe that the first bacteria came from an asteroid or from the finger of God, there is no denying that the structure in which bacteria could live had to exist prior to bacteria performing it’s first act of mitosis and splitting into two bacteriae.

The formation of the Church happens like this as well. Jesus creates his Church by choosing Apostles, and suddenly there is a structure - a form. But with a mere twelve people, this form has no living things in it. Bishops and Priests alone do not make up the Church. It doesn’t even seem a stretch to me to see Pentecost, the day that the tongues of fire touched the Apostles and Mary, as the moment of “Let there be light” in the universe. I’ve often felt that the “light” made much sense in the idea of the Big Bang, in the concept of fire, while simultaneously meaning “light” as in the act of creation itself. Pentecost was the Big Bang of the Christian story, as it exploded from Jerusalem, as critical mass was reached in prayer in the upper room when the tongues of fire touched the Apostles.

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