Campfire Scripture: Uncommon scriptures, simple truth… For pondering over a warm campfire.

Author, Date and Context:

James, not surprisingly, wrote James. James was skeptical of his Brother Jesus’ claim to be the messiah, until he saw the resurrected Christ. He then went on to be a martyr for the faith. The book has been confidently dated to within A.D. 44-49, which makes it the earliest authored epistle and book in the NT.

The book of James is the quintessential book on practical Christian living. As such it extols the importance of demonstrating your faith by works.

“Even so faith, if it has no works, is dead” James 2:17

The object of today’s devotion is the beginning of a passage about the source of strife and conflict.

What I Reckon:

I’ll be crafting an entire post about the pro’s and con’s of the Red Pill movement. If you’re not familiar the Red Pill movement, more or less, is a reactionary movement of guys, fed up with the gradual encroaching of progressive ideologies and their increasing marginalization of all males really, but perhaps white males more commonly. It’s an non-Christian movement, but often recognizes in general the role of Christianity in forming Western society and in a sense ‘pays tribute’ to that. They are also very commonly (and in fact in principle) majority alt-right leading political conservatives, so they often see eye to eye politically with a lot of evangelicals.

More importantly however, is that for the most part, the Red Pill movement is almost exclusively focused on men embracing their masculinity for almost exclusively selfish gains. Not entirely, but fundamentally the red-blooded male ‘self’ is at the core of the philosophy. More than anything Red Pill is focused, at least in practise, on ‘game’. I’ll leave it up to you to guess what that is. This is where it is severely at odds with Christianity.

What concerns me about the Red pill movement, is that it appears to be a primarily reactionary movement against the rise of feminism and Social Justice politics.

The ‘Red Pillers’, despite highlighting some important issues in our modern progressive culture, are mostly demonstrating what happens when one self collective reacts against another selfish collective.

You see, when you take Christ out of the equation, and are simply seeking ‘self’, it has no possible final outcome other than strife and conflict. Feminism is a vicious ideology that plays into the sinful hearts of women (and men) to prop up hatred of men (particularly white men) under a thinly veiled guise of ‘equality’. It hates the idea of biblical gender roles, because biblical gender roles have historically been distorted and misused by the sinful hearts of men to dominate women, instead of lead and protect them.

As a result, fed up and angry men (particularly white men) are rising up and coming out of the wood works to react to the increasing marginalization of males in Western Culture by political correctness. They attempt to achieve this by finding worldly means of building their self-confidence and neomasculinity through taking more pride in their appearance, their careers and (most importantly) in accumulating sexual conquest.

For both sides instead of tackling the problem of their sinful hearts, they’re both out to take what they can for themselves. This can only end badly for everyone.

This is just an oversimplified example of what this verse is talking about. When the ‘self’ is winning the internal war between our sinful heart, and our God-given conscience, it leads to internal conflict and sin, which leads to conflict between competing self seekers.

References

All Campfire Scripture passages are taken from the New American Standard Bible, unless otherwise stated.

John MacArthur, 2006, The MacArthur Study Bible,  New American Standard Bible (1995 edition).