I have been talking about the decline in our toxic culture. It is characterized by 5 Markers. This is what is ruining us in the USA. It's not the result of not knowing Jesus. Most CHRISTIANS I know embrace SOME or ALL of these attitudes. My concerns about our culture is the result of what I see everywhere as I travel around. It's not pretty:
1. Our toxic culture has become OBESE.
We are really fat, Obese. I am condemned by this as well. How did it become OK to indulge my flesh to the point of damaging my health. Look around our churches. WE ARE FAT. We most often do the good pentecostal thing... eat. We don't drink or smoke weed. We EAT. Obesity is a marker of a our toxic culture of indulgence that says; "I deserve this".
2. Our toxic culture won't deal with illegitimacy and rampant out of wedlock births.
An extraordinary percentage of births are now out of wedlock and illegitimate. It is now accepted. Not endorsed. Accepted. The CHURCH doesn't deal with it for fear of heaping condemnation on many in their congregations. Dealing with this issue isn't about showing love or not, but about erecting a righteous Ebenezer stone that says... this is the standard, no further. Let's live it.
3. Our toxic culture encourages women to marry UP .. so marriages don't happen.
I know too many women wanting to marry and too many men also wanting to marry to believe that it is a matter of statistics. Women desire to marry WAY UP. The term is Hypergamy. There is a parallel, women who get involved with men who are BAD BOYS. I have friends who would like to get married (men) who say, I don't have enough “swag”, aggression or an edgy appearance to attract a woman. These men have jobs, are not glittery, are decent guys and are more academically inclined, yet they are more marginalized and insulted. It's a culture problem. A toxic culture problem.
4. Our toxic culture is when men are marginalized and their households become matriarchal. Watch any sitcom on TV. What do you see? We no longer have heads of households that are male as a symbol. I like the Obama household for that reason, but the toxic culture keeps thinking that if Barack got out of order Michelle would kill him. That underlying attitude is evidence of the toxic culture. Men simply can't seem to avoid being a doormat if they marry. Watch the harpies on Jerry Springer and Mory Povich. Cultural icons. Watch Housewives of anywhere. What kind of men are these that live with these demons? The result of this is a textbook look at where we are in our culture: Men have high unemployment and incarceration rates, and young boys are be prone to violence, academic reticence, and poor performance in school. Nearly 70% of undergraduate and graduate degrees are earned by females. Men are practically disappearing from the higher echelons of the professional world and leave those women without suitable mates. These women will then proceed to ponder where all the good men went. They are there but don't want the abuse.
5. Our toxic culture is where boys and men are not valued for who they are as men.
There is an ANTI MALE attitude in our culture. Not just with women, with the whole culture. The term is Misandry. We don't want testosterone. They are violent. We want nice namby pamby men. Except we admire those with some testosterone. Our Toxic culture wants men to go to war, to build buildings, to keep the electricity on, water flowing and climb up those cell towers to make sure our I-phones still work, but we won't celebrate them. The feminization of our culture is toxic. Little boys no longer can play cops and robbers. Making a gun shape by your finger is considered a hate crime. It has become the subject of TV and movies. Verbal castration of men who demonstrate some maleness is in our public discourse. Public education is the core of this problem. Anti Male acculturation.
It sounds like I am hard on women in all this. I am not. Women are the victims of bad culture. They have culturally bought into a lie and are living it out on life's stage destroying what once was. The multiple nuclear bombs of societal cultural decline are going off. The end game is already on display. I am here to call out the toxic culture and to demand that the Church of Jesus begin to address this for what it is. Most churches have bought into the lie that MEN need to be more like WOMEN. Most church training for men is focused on neutering the males in their church. They don't understand the situation so they try to fix the wrong things. I refuse to be part of any such action. I am taking a stand. Let's get real about this issue. Our culture is in free fall and ONLY the church can catch it. We should be the one place where it can happen. The Church should be a beacon to the world. It is not.
It wasn’t always like this. Americans used to have more stable families and much lower illegitimacy rates than we have now. They were less obese. Men were valued once, less marginalized and expendable than they are now considered to be. We didn't deal with every expression of being a man by hauling them into a courtroom or a jailhouse. I know too many divorced dads living on the ragged edge of the law abused by a system designed to catch them at being a man.
This is a toxic culture, we are all victims, proponents and participants.
Time to man up men, and women let your man be one.
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