Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:06] Speaker B: Welcome to the Truth Exchange Podcast. This is a weekly program with Dr. Jeffrey J. Ventrella where he answers questions from subscribers around the globe, answering questions about worldview, cultural apologetics and other miscellaneous items.
I'm your host Joshua Gilo and this is another edition of the Director's Bag.
We had some really good interaction on the social media realm on the latest dicta, which is the impotent Manosphere. One writer asked the question or wrote on the manosphere blog piece. Dr. Ventrella calls out the dangers of some of the Ogden crowd and others on the Twitter world, including Andrew Tate.
Though as a side note he writes, I really question if Tate has any influence on the Christian men in any circles.
And I said there are dangers or end side note and he says I said there are dangers or see that there are dangers. But some of the good meat that Ogden, Rogan and even Peterson have to offer, it's kind of be smart as the old cow, eat the hay, spit out the sticks. Some of it's common grace, some of this is common grace issues that those guys are tapping into.
Stand up straight, comb your hair, make eye contact when you shake hands, be intentional and so on. Are there examples of non toxic but manly influencers that you would recommend?
[00:01:37] Speaker A: Well, that's a. I really appreciate the question and thank you for listening carefully and thank you for having a discerning spirit, not just throwing out babies in bathwaters.
So a couple of thoughts here. Number one, can we learn from from the unregenerate? Can we learn from pagans? Well, of course we can.
Scripture actually illustrates that in a number of ways. In fact, we can even learn from the created order.
The proverbs say go to the ant, observe her, see what she does. And so certainly particularly in the realm of common grace, there's going to be truth that is going to be exposed. The question is, is God getting the glory with respect to those truth kinds of claims and those issues, which is the secondary issue, because apart from faith, you can't please God that we know. But I also want to number two, the questioner talks about are there and he uses the word influencers. And I want to question whether we should be seeking influences that are out there in virtual reality, out there in some platform, so that we're feeding simply on something that's not real. In other words, we're feeding on something that is inherently mediated rather than as some of the younger generation says today, go step out in the grass. And I say this because the scripture tells us that elders are to be examples to the flock, well, the flocks male and female, young and old and so on, so forth. And so the best influencers may be people that don't even have an Instagram or an X account.
They may be people that are in your heritage, your grandfather, your father. Those are the kinds of, quote, influencers, quote, that are actually going to have the most retail capital, I think, when it's all said and done. Because they're going to teach not only didactically as to say, giving you information, they're going to lead by example.
[00:03:39] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:03:40] Speaker A: And that is a huge mover to do that.
Folks like, you know, Joe Rogan, Andrew Tate, some of these other folks, you don't know what their lives are like.
I find, you know, because I'm a MMA fan, other than his crass language, Joe Rogan's very insightful and knows certain things and he lets people talk. He, he has a spirit of inquiry. He had the apologist Christian West Huff on and asked some very good questions.
He lets people talk even if he disagrees with them, unlike a lot of other kinds of media folks. But you don't know his life. We know that he's married to one woman, he has children. Okay, but are you seeing them when they have bad days?
Are you seeing them as they're processing suffering?
Are you seeing them having a gentle word to their wives? Are you seeing examples of their repentance?
If you are tapping into influencers where you don't have a full orbed human Christian experience, I question whether those influences are the best for you. And so I'm reluctant to name some, for lack of a better word, celebrity.
But I do think there are people that we can look at that have a hunger and thirst for the Lord God, for His Word, who and are passionate in these other things.
I hope that our, our writer doesn't think that's some form of a dodge, but I really think we've got the wrong paradigm.
[00:05:16] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:05:16] Speaker A: I think that we're looking out for mediated influence rather than take the latate, face to face kinds of influence and that sort of thing. So I would not rule out listening. I listened to lots of Believe it or not cassette tapes back in the day when I was being theologically formed and all those kinds of things.
[00:05:39] Speaker B: Right.
[00:05:39] Speaker A: But I do think in today's age it's so easy just to swipe through things. And swipe means swish through, not steal. When I was growing up, to swipe meant to engage in theft. Yeah, it's a very different concept.
[00:05:55] Speaker B: Right.
[00:05:55] Speaker A: But just going through and swipe to the right kind of a deal.
[00:05:59] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:05:59] Speaker A: If you don't like something, as opposed to the discipline of sitting under someone's life and that sort of stuff.
[00:06:05] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:06:05] Speaker A: What do you think, Joshua?
[00:06:06] Speaker B: I really appreciate the wisdom, Jeff, of your answer, because what you are really are doing, and I don't think it's a dodge at all, is that you've encouraged not only the gentleman who wrote in, but you're encouraging our listeners really to go out and access what is at their hands and interact with the body, interact with their elders. And I think that's a godly, that's a biblical. It's just wise. And rather than looking to somebody who you don't know on social media. And as you said, you haven't seen them repent, you haven't seen them interact with their wife, you don't see them interact with their children and so on, you just see them on the stage of Twitter or Facebook and you download their music or you listen to their podcasts, you can't access them. But your elders in your church, your local church, you can. And what a blessing that is for the church.
[00:07:03] Speaker A: You know, I just thought of something. You know, my father passed many, many decades ago, but one thing he taught me, he was a professional musician. He was very good and had a lot of famous friends. I mean, like album after album after album of people you would know if I were to name drop.
But it was very interesting. He said, just remember he used a pet name for me. He said, Jeffer. These guys, most of them are the best they'll ever be on stage.
And they get off stage and they're, you know, they can be drunks or drug addicts or, you know, you name it, or, or, you know, philanderers and that sort of thing. And so that kind of prepared me for kind of the era we're in now.
Some of these people that we just adulate, oh, I go to conferences. I was, I was one of, you know, 600 people and I saw this person, he said this. It was really funny. You didn't see him bats backstage, rip the head off the sound guy.
[00:08:02] Speaker B: Right.
[00:08:02] Speaker A: Or one of those things. Now, some of these people don't do that, of course.
[00:08:05] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:08:05] Speaker A: But my point is that you, if you're taking an influence, you're getting a very crabbed vector into their lives. And I think that we need to be mentored in a more full orbed way because we're embodied, studied humans.
[00:08:19] Speaker B: Yes. Next up, we have the question, could your podcast address the rise of feminism and its Influence on today's culture that seemed to be missing on the recent article on the impotent manosphere. I see a lot of what the influencers online are attacking are against the longhouses of feminism that has shaped the culture.
Jeff, are you familiar with that phrase longhouses? And if you are, could you talk about it?
[00:08:49] Speaker A: I am. It's, it's a, it's a slang slur term. It means, it usually when we use slang or slur terms, it's because we refuse to think and we just put people in a box. Basically it means like it's, it's a home where the woman kind of just controls everything through the house and that sort of thing.
[00:09:09] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:09:10] Speaker A: And it's, it's a favorite phrase of kind of these, a neo boys kind of a deal. And those folks. Well, the question raised a very important question. Let me just say point of personal privilege for biography. I was involved in opposing the feminist ecosystem in the Reformed Church back in the 1980s and thereafter and spent a lot of time addressing it, seeing what it was and showing that it was deficient, defective and injurious. So certainly myself, and certainly Truth Exchange, you know, our founders and, and were on the council of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, which with Wayne Grudem and others, a lot of scholars who opposed this idea of feminism. I've read tons of material on this, talked about it, but you know, the firemen must go where the fire exists. And what we're seeing in this neo masculinity busyness is a pendulum that swung far too away. And so a lot of these folks are really blame casting, you know, and really looking at themselves as victims. Poor me, poor me. You know, the women are tyrannical. Well, in the culture. Who goes to, to university and higher education? More men or women? Women.
[00:10:36] Speaker B: Women.
[00:10:36] Speaker A: Who's graduating more from university?
Women. The only statistically significant place where men dominate in grad school is in the MBA programs.
That, that's just about it.
And certainly some of the hard weird sciences and that sort of thing, but everything else is pretty much dominated. So you're seeing people look at that fact and saying, oh, that's a feminist idea. Well, it may or may not be. It's. In other words, they're taking a quantitative reality, right. And making it seem like it's purely ideological. Well, you know, that may be true. Certainly it's influential. But we do take a stand against the outgrowth of feminism when we talk about having children.
Opposing BOARD of Facie Speaking of the dangers of a contraceptive mentality all those things are echoes of feminist ethos. And of course, the Truth Exchange scholars would be staunchly opposed to feminism. People like Dr. Sandlin, Dr. Butterfield. And it goes on and on and on.
And in fact, Rebecca Jones wrote a book, does Christianity Squish Women? Or something like that.
[00:11:58] Speaker B: Right, Right.
[00:11:58] Speaker A: So we, we've dealt with this.
What you're seeing now is we have limited time, limited space, and unfortunately, we're seeing a whole generation of young men being distorted and malformed by this manosphere stuff. So that's why we're sending the warning up. And really, I think finally, Joshua, the Burden by my friend Anthony Bradley, who I quoted extensively, was to show that there's a dereliction of duty by the church.
And we really need to be thinking more effectively and innovatively in terms of addressing what these young men actually need and actually crave, because sometimes those are aligned, sometimes they're not aligned. But we need to be very faithful in championing our message, which has confidence, which has clarity and has conviction, because we're called to do that. We're called to call people, ourselves into battle to do that.
[00:13:00] Speaker B: This concludes a recording of the Director's Bag. For more resources from Truth Exchange, please visit us online at www.truthexchange.com. you can follow us on X as well as Facebook for more updates and content related to Truth Exchange. Be sure to join us next week for more questions from the Director's Bag.
I'm your host, Joshua Gilo, and this is the Truth Exchange podcast.
