Commenter 7817 noted:
TBayly on Twitter has begun posting #manup beatdowns on a daily basis.
I pulled up Pastor Bayly’s twitter page to see what he was talking about, and it struck me that Bayly doesn’t have his heart in his man up rants anymore:
The magic is clearly gone for him, and he is reduced to phoning it in. A bit further down there is perhaps a spark, although not much of one:
It is possible this is just a short term bout of complementarian blues, and one day soon Bayly will once again be able to deliver full throated man up rants. But it would be understandable if he finds he can’t snap out of his late stage complementarian funk. All of the doublespeak is exhausting. It is supposed to be exhausting for the listener. That is the point, to wear would be critics out not with scripture and reason, but with sheer volume of traditional-but-not-traditional doublespeak. Yet it has to eventually become exhausting for the double-speaker as well.
In November of last year Bayly boldly tweeted that husbands need to exercise their headship muscles. Prince Asbel asked for concrete examples of how a husband might do this. When distraction failed Bayly was forced to backtrack, laughably explaining that husbands “exercised authority muscles” by lots of pleading:
After that embarrassment Bayly can be forgiven for being gun-shy when it comes to bold man up rants. Even his tepid taunt of men who don’t marry comes with the risk of being soundly called out. Imagine for example that Bayly’s man up tweet is just what it takes to convince a man in Bayly’s congregation to marry. He marries and then his fear, the fear Bayly says is justified, comes true. His wife rebels. He tries pleading, and more pleading, and then yet more pleading. But somehow this makes him seem weak. So he follow’s Bayly’s other advice and goes to Bayly and the elders (the session), asking for help admonishing his wife. Bayly’s response is going to be that it isn’t his problem, and (adding insult to injury) he will suggest that the husband was foolish to marry a woman who might rebel!
If you were the husband asking me this question in my office, I’d say to you, “Don’t ask me—she’s your wife!” and we’d both laugh a little nervously. This precise exchange has happened before in my work as a pastor and one of the reasons I’ve responded this way is to reassure the brother he’s not alone in his problems, but also that they are his problems—not mine.
…I’d suggest you not haul your wife before the session. This counsel may surprise some, but it’s my experience most domestic problems involving the sin of women are best handled quietly by the Titus 2 “older women” of the Church, not the elders and pastors…
Sadly, the sort of husband who demands his pastor or elders reduce his wife to submission to him is the sort of man who is generally pathetic. Often he can’t face his own failures in leadership, so he drops his wife on the pastors and elders demanding they do what he couldn’t or wouldn’t.
Don’t let him manipulate you into feeling responsible for his dilemma. You can pity him. You can sympathize with him. You can help him. But don’t let him place the responsibility for his wife’s conduct in his home on you. He married her.
The thing is, the doublespeak mostly works. The intended audience will mostly give up trying to follow and simply assume Bayly really is being traditional. They will stop thinking about it because the doublespeak makes their heads hurt. But the longer the complementarian ruse goes on, the more doublespeak it requires. At the very least, since it is fundamentally a delaying tactic the need for more doublespeak never goes away. The quote I shared above comes from an 8 part series of doublespeak Bayly wrote on the subject of a husband’s authority in marriage.
Not long before his 8 story tall wall of doublespeak text around the authority of husbands, he wrote another post explaining that good Christian husbands should follow Martin Luther’s example and call their wives lord:
First, let it be said that Martin and Katie’s home was not Martin’s fiefdom, but Katie’s. Luther was a wise man who didn’t patronize women. He saw the division of authority God had decreed between man and woman and he didn’t infringe on Katie’s turf. She presided over the home and its domesticity, and he presided over the church and its instruction. Katie was the minister of internal affairs and Martin the minister of external affairs.
Is this heinous to our twenty-first century ears? If so, read on while asking yourself if any woman you know today has as much breadth of leadership, strength of influence, and personal authority as did Martin’s dear Katie?
Did Martin respect Katie’s authority over the home?
Yes. Martin affectionately referred to his wife as “My Lord Katie.”
Bayly delights in the thought of Lord Katie putting her husband in his place in front of guests:
After the evening meal, Martin retired to the living room with a small group of friends—and one woman, Katie. Here was the place where Luther’s “table talk” was recorded. Being the only woman present, Katie was no shrinking wallflower. She didn’t hesitate to express her disapproval of the talk—Martin’s in particular.
In fact, Bayly explains that the problem with modern Christian marriage is that it lacks this chivalrous bit of gender bending:
What John and these other reformed celebrities lack is “My Lord Katie.” She’d quickly put them in their place, and what a blessing it would be to the church of our time.
Bayly demonstrates in a note at the end of the post that he and his wife “My Lord Mary Lee” play the very same chivalrous game (emphasis mine) *:
Originally, I included the names of reformed celebrities in each of these particulars, but My Lord Mary Lee told me to take them out…
I won’t try to sum up all of Bayly’s reversals in his complementarian doublespeak, because it is as it is intended to be, exhausting. But eventually the sheer weight of decades of duplicity will become too much for even the most energetic complementarian to bear. Eventually the cuteness wears off, and we are left with only exhaustion. Even worse, all of the cool complementarians have moved on from selling traditional-seeming-feminism to selling traditional-seeming-homosexuality. At least they get to move on to a new fresh form of doublespeak, something they can practice for decades before it becomes as wearisome as the feminist form Bayly and a handful of others like Pastor Wilson restrict themselves to.
*Moderator’s Note: As I asked in a previous post, please keep the focus away from Pastor Bayly’s wife. Any comments that are unkind to his wife will be deleted and the commenter will be placed in moderation status for future comments. As disturbing as it is that a pastor would play such games with his wife, the much larger harm comes from him virtue signaling and modeling this role inversion via Warhorn media.
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