Patriarchy and Paternalism: What's Different About the Christian West?

Conversations That Matter

Jon Harris

Society & Culture

4.6 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 12 December 2025

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The “trad wife” trend shows people are starving for natural order after feminism’s damage — but not all patriarchy is the same.

Nietzschean vitalism (Bronze Age Pervert, Andrew Tate, etc.) celebrates raw conquest, optional families, and disposable wives.

That’s not what built the West.

The West was built by a different kind of man: monogamous, self-controlled, paternal Christian fathers who protected the weak, adopted the fatherless, and saw dominion as a duty to family, community, and God — not an end in itself.

If we replace that paternal strength with either polygamous warlord energy or soft nanny-state nudging, the civilization that conquered the world will fall. We are not just patriarchal. We are paternal — and that’s the part worth saving.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host John Harris. I want to talk about an article I wrote for Substack last week called The Patriarchy that conquered the world paternalism in Christian civilization.
0:26.9	And I think this is an important topic because what's happening right now is a lot of people
0:33.7	are going back to the drawing board. They want to find the blueprint for how society
0:38.5	should be arranged, whether that's in the family, or if they're Christians in the church, or
0:42.9	in any of their civic organizations. They want to know what should politics look like,
0:49.0	what should business look like, what should A, B, or C look like? Because we know that liberalism, that feminism,
0:56.0	that a lot of the other isms haven't been working. And I think there's a suspicion that these things
1:01.0	are just artificial innovations that have been foisted upon us out of step with the wisdom of
1:07.7	ages past, whether it's even been forgotten or not, people just sense there's
1:11.8	something wrong with it. And they're looking for some kind of a rootedness, some kind of a place
1:17.9	to go where they can find answers. And some of them go to good places. There are faithful pastors
1:27.2	out there, I think especially on local levels,
1:29.4	that are faithfully communicating with the Word of God teaches, and maybe they know a thing or two
1:33.8	about how our society has operated in the good and true and valuable ways, and they're going to
1:40.0	receive wisdom. Some of them have been passed down wisdom already. I think I was fortunate enough to be
1:45.9	raised in a home where I had a pretty strong father figure. I knew what a man was. I didn't have to
1:50.4	question these things. I kind of knew the blueprint. I knew why liberalism and feminism were wrong.
1:56.0	But not everyone has that. And I think some people have tried to find answers in bad places,
2:01.2	places that have given them, quote-unquote, solutions that aren't really solutions.
2:06.2	They land them in spots that are just as bad, if not worse, than the course they would
2:12.3	have taken otherwise. Or they are just looping back right back into a liberal framework.
2:19.9	And they say they're saving you from it, but they're not.
	...

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