Chastity, piety, and self-governance
The Prayerful Digest: The rights of women in Christian republics, bad men, good patriarchy, and the book club (also why you need to read The End of Women)
Happy Spring, friends! I am writing to you from a vibrant Ozark forest that is full of birdsong and the verdant glimmer of new leaves, and it is glorious (and apparently warranted a very poetic description).
Seems a fitting time to launch a redux of my old paid newsletter format, The Prayerful Digest. I wanted to share a sundry collection of musings and essays, other articles I’ve written or work by other writers, and our one big shared passion over here — books!
So grab a fresh coffee or a hot cup of tea and join me this week as we discuss how Ireland recently tried to remove protections for women in its constitution, good vs. bad patriarchy, why I’m still shamelessly obsessed with Agatha Christie, and why you need to read The End of Women.
Oh! But before we dive in, I wanted to share a piece I wrote for the
last week, Clean your house. It’s good for you.Also, ICYMI, I shared a bit last week about the heart behind the homesteading movement and why I do not believe it’s very helpful to cast it as a passing “trend.”
All right, now let’s dive in:
Piety, Chastity, and Self-Governance
A few weeks ago, Ireland held a referendum on International Women’s Day that, fittingly for the Marxist holiday, would have changed articles in the originally very Catholic republic’s constitution that state:
2 1° In particular, the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.
2° The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.
Written ahead of the vote,
’s What is a Mother? Ireland's Progressive Integralism chronicles the religious underpinnings of Ireland’s constitution and the grievous misapprehension that redefining family and motherhood will in any way help women.This is true for the whole of the broad encroachment of Marxist critical theory’s twisted ideas across the formerly Christian west and the “marginalized” groups they profess to aim to help.
In the same way that body mutilation and pharmaceutically altering hormone production are being peddled as “medical care,” sanitizing the family unit of gender distinctions and holding no unique expectation that women remain home with their children are just tools of the globalist machine to whom human beings are mere capital and starry-eyed ideals of “liberation” are just a marketing campaign.
An example: when it was reported that Citigroup had packages to pay for employees to procure out-of-state abortions following the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, the details were listed as part of the company’s “compensation and human capital management highlights.”
Let that sink in. Managing “human capital” easily includes paying to send women to medically murder their unborn children in the same way we might pay to have a bull castrated or a dog fixed in the interest of maintaining farm or home harmony.
This is not policy based on maintaining the best interests of women, and thus, human beings. It is based on maintaining the best interests of an organization headed by lavishly wealthy people who gamble with other people’s money for a living and view whole, entire human beings as “capital” to be “managed.”
Such management, as farm and modern life will tell you, includes the snuffing out of life.
Citigroup sees female human beings as livestock in powersuits and impressive portfolios, dependent upon their feeding hand not for daily grain and hay but a means to keep their elaborately comfortable, debt-based modern lifestyles afloat.
As Kingsnorth writes, “The values of the home - of mothers and fathers, of the home economy, of self-sufficiency, of production rather than consumption - are inimical to the values of the Machine, built as it is on consumerism, individualism and an astroturfed version of ‘liberation’ which amounts in reality to enforced commercial employment.”
The religious underpinnings of Ireland’s Constitution matter for the same reason our own oft-denied yet undeniable religious underpinnings in the United States.
You cannot base a system of self-governance on a wavering understanding of human rights and thus, you cannot maintain such a system with a wavering understanding of what it means to be human.
And how we define what it means to be human, which proceeds with how we view man in relation to God, also then necessarily includes how we view men, and women as well as the differences between and responsibilities we bear to one another.
The postmodern lies that sex is “meaningless” and sex distinctions "social constructs” are quite literally godless, as the distinction between male and female is one of the principal characteristics of being human. (See, the Book of Genesis)
It also then conforms to biological, logical, and spiritual common sense to recognize that society’s moral principles that govern sexuality are pretty important.
What’s more, they’re made exponentially more important by the fact that they concern the product of the male and female bond: children.
Chastity is not, as I was taught to believe growing up, an archaic relic of a hypocritical religious people yet unenlightened by Freudian theories of sexual repression and liberation.
Rather, it is faithfulness to the virtue and fruit of godly sexuality, which is the culmination and purpose of marriage and the origin of all humanity according to God’s design for it.
So it is also piety — not just to religious beliefs but the moral duty that sincere religious belief inspires — that is necessary for a people to govern themselves before God.
Whether the classically western ideals of liberty are responsible for or have been adulterated by contemporary social radicalsim is certainly up for debate. We couldn’t possibly say, since Marx and Freud came later and it is upon their shoulders I place much of the blame for the state of western society today.
This much is true: cultures that interpret “liberty” to mean freedom from God’s laws rather than freedom to govern oneself according to them have chosen to be governed by the tyranny of human desire, which is a very wicked tyranny indeed.
Which leads me to…
Bad men, good patriarchy
Something that is incredibly important to understand about the evolution of feminism is that many, many men who lacked moral compasses were eager to accept its precepts that sex could be detached from marriage and responsibility.
And what man with poor self-governance when it comes to sexuality wouldn’t find an allure in the shining promises of free love and disillusionment of the bonds of marriage?