Andrew Tate is Bad, Christians Who Only Half Condemn Him Are Worse
I’ve started and stopped writing this many times, but I think I’ve finally reached the point where I’d rather hit ‘publish’ and move on from feeling a burning desire to say my piece than sit by. “Critique by creating” as it were.
The popularity of Andrew Tate and the ascension of the Manosphere (or the Redpill movement, or MGTOW, or whatever name will be used next year) has forced popularizers and culture commentators to pick up the topic of masculinity and the obvious epidemic of broken sex relations in the American West.
Unfortunately, the commentary being offered on these misogynistic brutes among Christian pop culture critics not only misses the mark, but handles young men captivated by the criminal Tate brothers with kid gloves they are decidedly too old and too immature to deserve. Every single comment offered by these holier-than-thou white knights of masculinity gives lip service to what the Tate’s offer young men. Consider the following tweet (link):
Like many “manosphere” personalities, Tate is always rebranding. He is a hustler in the old sense of the word. But so many Christians fail to realize that it’s not primarily his vileness (and he is vile) that’s made him so popular with young Christian men. It’s simply that he takes “their side” and calls them to a form of excellence (albeit truncated & worldly).
That little turn right there at the end- “calls them to a form of excellence.” That right there is utterly unacceptable. It carries with it this implication that young men are not being challenged or are simply being left by the wayside. The “young men are under attack and they just want someone to take their side” is a take I am utterly sick of hearing. For a group obsessed with calling out perpetual victims when they’re on the left, these types sure do a whole lot of pandering to their own base when the opportunity strikes. Forgive me if I doubt the sincerity of someone who claims playing the victim card is a weak excuse and then rushes to excuse his own crowd’s worst behaving elements by calling them victims.
Just in case I haven’t been abundantly clear yet: there is nothing redeeming about the Tates or any of the Manosphere misogynists. Their popularity has everything to do with normalizing and excusing the worst behaviors of men while skewering, demeaning, and antagonizing women they deem to be “low quality” for hypocritical reasons. It is for these reasons I am appalled at the men who call themselves Christians claiming there is some ethereal kernel of truth in what these reprobates preach.
If you think Christianity is “too effeminate” for men, maybe that’s because men are less likely to claim religion is “very important” to them when compared to women. I myself experienced this when I attended undergraduate at Moody Bible Institute and the disparity in numbers of admissions between men and women was shocking. Men are less religious. The reason men think Christianity is effeminate is, most likely, because men are simply less Christian than women.
The idea that “masculinity is under attack” in the West is dangerous because, like all the worst lies, it is very nearly true. There is a war against masculinity- and its being waged by men against themselves. The idea that men in the West have lost their purpose and are suffering for it is not one I need to prove as it is self evidently true. The issue here is that it is men who have pursued this lack of purpose every step of the way. There are no societal controllers who forced men into this position. There is no grand conspiracy to destroy the nuclear family. It’s actually far worse than all of this. Men have, through their own stupid, short-term self-interest made a society that destroys them, body and soul, in the most decadent and deceitful ways imaginable.
Who coerces their partners into abortion? Who has made OnlyFans and other personal pornography businesses sell so well? Who forced women into the workplace to turn them into individualistic consumers, baited with the fear that their husband could abandon them and they would be without any ability to care for themselves? Consumerism didn’t target men for destruction against their will, it sold what men were buying and will continue to buy: easy sex with undemanding partners. There is nothing noble in how Andrew Tate calls men to “be better.” There isn’t anything profound in saying that men should be “dangerous.” Gassing a man up with platitudes about sexuality and strength has precisely zero to do with anything helpful. The kind of man who finds Tate compelling is not in need of affirmations of his manliness. He needs to have his illusions shattered.
We do not affirm the “core desire” of Adam and Eve in the garden when the Serpent tempted them. There was no “kernel of truth” in the Serpent’s temptation. In the same way, we ought not coddle these sorry, deceived abusers of women and themselves. They need to be told the weakness they feel is because they are weak. They need to be told that the reason women do not like them is because they are unlikable. They need to be told that their desire for sexual intimacy with women is actually bad.
In truth: they are weak, otherwise they wouldn’t be captivated by the silver tongue of a sex-trafficking conman. They are unlikable, otherwise they wouldn’t be desperate to force women to like them. Their desire for sexual intimacy is bad because it is rooted in self-aggrandizing lust and control.
Strength only bestows confidence when it can be controlled. Companionship with a woman is only good when you are already satisfied with God. Sexual intimacy is only good when motivated by self-giving love for the other. They lack all of these and will never learn them from the trickster brothers, nor any of their ilk. They do not need to be told they are, at base, desiring something that is legitimately theirs and they simply need to find the right way to go about it. They need to be told they are wrong- get this- because they are wrong.
They are wrong because they are sinners. They are wrong because the desires that go unsatisfied are not focused on God.
James 4:2–3
You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.
No man with a proper, rightly ordered desire for sexual intimacy would buy what the Tate’s sell. A man in possession of himself who has the confidence required to have friendships with both men and women alike has no need of the RedPill’s venomous hatred of femeninty and accusations rooted in contempt for God’s created order. A young man whose strength in body and mind comes from the confidence that he has been bought with a price, the very blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, would find himself heaping mockery upon the likes of the Manosphere, not stupidly enraptured by their siren’s song of “poor little Jimmy can’t find a girl that isn’t a whore.”
