Dr. Joe Rigney is a Fellow of Theology at New St. Andrews college in Moscow, Idaho, plus the author of “Leadership and Emotional Sabotage: Resisting the Anxiety That Will Wreck Your Family, Destroy Your Church, and Ruin the World.”
In this episode, we discuss his new book and the courage that Christian men need to show in helping to extract their families, churches, and nation from emotional sabotage
Topics discussed:
His Journey To Learn About Untethered Empathy
The Unmooring of Our Virtues
The Meaning of a Mature Adult
Being Responsible for Yourself Before God
Why Virtue Requires Fear
Defining Respectable and Credible the Way God Does
Being the Image of God to Your Wife and Kids
For more about Dr. Joe Rigney please visit:
https://twitter.com/joe_rigney
https://emotionalsabotage.com/
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FULL MONOLOGUE:
As many of you know, I spent most of my life as a liberal, basically until summer 2016 when I discovered that American leftist values are not human universals. Then Trump’s election and the circumstances surrounding it finished off my desire to associate with the left, with Democrats, and with progressivism as a whole.
It was one thing to unwind my belief in the state as the solution to the world’s problems, but it was quite another to dismantle all the socio-cultural programming I had absorbed.
The hardest bit I had to unplug was around communication.
I noticed quickly my own tendency towards indirect speech, not saying what I meant, and dancing around the point. If you listen to me now, you might find that hard to believe. But it’s true.
I also noticed how quickly I and others would jump to defuse tense situations by placating people, silencing dissent, and bowing to the loudest and most shrill voices, even if they were being unreasonable.
But most importantly, I watched the way that families, communities, and conversations were being manipulated by the most shrill and demanding voices among us.
In these scenarios, everyone would rush to defuse tension. This left issues simmering beneath the surface, rather than boldly confronting them. This would be difficult enough, except I also observed that the experts at this particular game would often wield unearned power in the situation.
One of the great blessings of COVID for me was that it gave me a chance to sit back and examine where I’d come from, both overseas and the Bay Area, and consider these phenomena from afar. I spent time in group chats with men and observed the way we’d all talk with each other. Then when I took that communication style out into the world, I’d find that things worked very differently, experiencing the same manipulative power dynamics I’d described above being used against me and others who tried to communicate using clear speech.
And that’s when I realized: the war we’re all fighting today isn’t just a cultural war, an economic war, or even a political war. It’s a language war, with words as the threats and adult forms of temper tantrums as the consequences.
This works by playing upon everyone’s inability to stand strong in the face of social tension and conflict. It squashes masculine resistance in clear speech and bashes everyone down into speech patterns that constrain the expression of certain ideas. By constraining expression, you constrain thought. And that’s how wokeness functions. It’s awful, anti-human, and anti-male.
And it’s literally how the liberal world works. Having lived in San Francisco for over a decade, I can tell you that’s true, and it was the hardest thing to unplug from my own mind because I had to do it one interaction at a time.
So you can imagine how shocked I was to see these same patterns inside churches and small groups. I thought Christianity was the masculine religion, with God the Father and His Son Jesus Christ. The patriarchs. The disciples and apostles. Covenants and headship!
And amidst all that, manipulative speech patterns controlling thought and dialogue? I was shocked. I didn’t know what to do. I can understand constraining unrighteous and ungodly speech. That’s fine. But forbidding clear, direct, and masculine speech to protect feelings? That made no sense to me, from within a Christian framework. And for a long time, I thought I was alone. I didn’t know that anyone else could see it. I wondered what to say and how.
But thankfully, someone else had it all figured out.
Which brings me to my guest this week. His name is Dr. Joe Rigney, and he’s a Fellow of Theology at New St. Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho, plus the author of the outstanding book, "Leadership and Emotional Sabotage: Resisting the Anxiety That Will Wreck Your Family, Destroy Your Church, and Ruin the World."
That’s a bold claim about the power of emotional sabotage, and it’s one I can validate. Because Dr. Rigney has put his finger on the spot that I’ve seen first in the world, and that has now infiltrated the church. It’s a silent power that doesn’t wield physical force, rather emotional and verbal force to get its way, which runs directly counter to the Gospel.
And I think as a society, we were largely unprepared for the arrival of this form of “soft power” in the 20th century, after millennia of so-called “hard power.” So it crept in unnoticed and took over, crippling every institution that it touched, including evangelicalism. Stephen Wolfe might call it the most effective weapon of gynocracy.
But now, with a resurgent church, husbands, fathers, and pastors are beginning to encounter this nameless force like I did, and it’s not merely an academic question. They see it weakening everything around them, including their own households and families.
Which is why Dr. Rigney has performed an admirable service documenting what’s going on in brief, clear language, not overburdening the point, and providing a map for faithful leaders to help guide us out.
In our conversation, Dr. Rigney and I discussed:
His Journey To Learn About Untethered Empathy
The Unmooring of Our Virtues
The Meaning of a Mature Adult
Being Responsible for Yourself Before God
Why Virtue Requires Fear
Defining Respectable and Credible the Way God Does
Being the Image of God to Your Wife and Kids
If you enjoy the Renaissance of Men Podcast, thank you. Please leave us a 5-star rating on Spotify, and a 5-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts.
If this is your first time here, welcome. I release new episodes about the Christian counterculture, masculine virtue, and the family every week.
Just a reminder that many things about this podcast will be changing very soon.
As you heard me say a couple of weeks ago, this podcast will soon become The Will Spencer Podcast. New brand, new topics, new guests, same format you love.
This has been a long time coming, and I’m excited. I hope you are too. And I hope you won’t mind these regular reminders, to make sure we all come along together.
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And please welcome this week’s guest on the podcast, the author of "Leadership and Emotional Sabotage: Resisting the Anxiety That Will Wreck Your Family, Destroy Your Church, and Ruin the World," Dr. Joe Rigney.
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