Don't Drink the Bitterness

Don't Join the Accuser

A Man is Accused.

The accusation spreads faster than verification.

Even when leadership resists the lie, the field remains poisoned.

The man exits—not because guilt was proven, but because trust becomes uninhabitable.

This is Not My Story

It is a story I was told yesterday. I was told a similar story a few days before. I heard another just like it last week.

This matters because Christianity is under an attack the average churchgoer cannot see. Damage to men does not require institutional cruelty. It only requires moral risk-aversion. It is in the water. It is on the wind. Increasingly, it is simply the way things are.

Once an accusation exists, the safest move for any system of people feels like the removal of the man. This is not because anyone hates men “on principle.” As degraded as misanthropy has become, hatred of men as an abstract ideology is only one fractured slice of a much larger inequality system.

Click the Link to Read More on the Zeitgeist of Narrative Inversion

More specific—and more dangerous—is a moral environment that cannot tolerate authority once it is compromised by story. Truth is costly. Facts take time. Yet even without evidence, emotion can still feel righteous.

The present moral regime, cultivated by perpetual connectivity and familial fragmentation, loses the ability to distinguish authority from threat once fear activates as contagion. This is not hatred. It is not even malice, though the malicious can exploit it. It is epistemic collapse: the disempowerment of a people mass-formed to believe their own strength is a danger to themselves.

When Fear Reigns:

• accusation becomes evidence

• emotion becomes moral authority

• protection becomes suspicion

• male presence becomes liability

This present darkness punishes function, not essence. Misanthropy and misogyny are both catalyzed, both invoked, both blamed. But men are not disproportionately targeted “because they are men” in some crude or ideological sense. Rather, men tend to occupy roles that require authority, speech, and boundary-setting. These are precisely the social vocations that become intolerable once fear and grievance define morality. In such a closed system—whether family, church, or company—the pack does not reason its way to moral decisions. It reacts its way there.

Under fear, the moral question shifts from “What is right?” to “What keeps me safe?” Safety is no longer grounded in truth or justice but in alignment. Worth is measured by proximity to the dominant story. Distance from the accused becomes an ethic unto itself, felt rather than reasoned.

Grievance fuels the burn. What would otherwise be tolerable, or even desired, begins converting pain into capital. Suffering ceases to be something to be healed and becomes a form of power to be displayed. The more vivid the wound, the higher the status.

This reverses the classical moral arc. Where endurance and restraint once signaled maturity, exposure and accusation now signal virtue. The system rewards those who are loudest about being wounded, because wounds themselves become the new authority.

This is How Crowds Trample People

In animal pack behavior, survival depends on rapid threat detection and collective alignment. Packs do not adjudicate truth; they respond to signals. A cry of alarm triggers movement before verification. This is adaptive in predation contexts. Wolves must live this way. But it is disastrous in moral—that is, human—ones.

When grievance is empowered as a virtuous threat signal, the pack’s nervous system activates like an immune system. Members align reflexively, not reflectively. Fear sharpens this reactivity. Urgency collapses nuance. Perception polarizes. There is only friend or enemy, safe or dangerous, inside or outside. Nuance and grace become liabilities. Disagreement itself becomes intolerable.

The pack learns that questioning the alarm risks expulsion. Silence becomes preferred compliance. Echo becomes the path to recognition and social validation. Morality collapses into a loyalty test. Those with status may accuse without cost. The ranks must signal assent or risk association with the threat. The accused either bow into appeasement behaviors—abasement as explanation, public self-criticism, ritual apology—or accept the shunning and exclusion that inevitably follow.

The tragedy is that neither path restores trust. Instead, a spirit of subordination entrenches itself. Fear becomes the enduring morale of the pack. Blame, shame, and quiet avoidance settle in as the common language. Attempts at reform may occur, but the pack does not forget. Anyone, at any time, can become the next scapegoat.

Babes in Malice

Animosity is uniquely destructive because it devours intimacy, witness, and shared story:

• the private becomes weaponized

• trusted witness is corrupted

• bystanders become leverage

• the past is rewritten

Reframing authority is not a gender-specific evil. Everyone is susceptible to fear and grievance taking command of human bonds. Everyone is vulnerable within a society that bows to managed narratives assigning disproportionate power to fear.

Still, it would be dishonest to deny that, in this cultural climate, the pattern devastates men disproportionately. For decades, the temperature has been slowly raised by the rulers and powers of our age. Men are more dangerous than women—not as a moral defect, but as a capacity. That same capacity makes them protectors, providers, and stalwarts. Yet once this potential good is placed under permanent suspicion, when authority itself is reframed as a threat to public safety, animosity acquires exceptional force.

Women begin to blame men. In response, a subset of men begin to blame women. A cursory look at social media will reveal manifold influencers eager to inflame both sides for clicks and likes. In such heat, ideology alone cannot save us. When the air we breath sacrifices truth to preserve safety, no matter which side one occupies in the fight, the resulting fragility becomes a shared vulnerability.

Go Outside

The only solution is to repent of the system.

You cannot blame. You must not fear. You need not carry it on your own shoulders. Instead, prepare to survive.

Terror is its own weapon and its own war. You cannot build a better self by either submitting to it or by appealing to it. You cannot find freedom while worshiping paranoia. You must recognize the mismeasured scale for what it is and repent of it for what it is: the worship of despair.

When packs under stress look for enemies. When resources feel scarce and grievance becomes a focus for anxiety, blame gives shape to unease. Over time, the social compact grows brittle.

You cannot argue this fear back into health. You must lower your own threat threshold. You must restore shared reality by surrendering tomorrow’s standing to God.

Decoupling from fear means refusing to signal grievance. It means chasing bitterness away through repentance. It means insisting to your own soul that virtue is not mere cohesion, but cohesion aligned with the patient righteousness of the cross.

It is not manhood that is collapsing in the West. It is clarity. The new moral order of godlessness, which first took the schools last century, is now subsuming truth beneath a spirit of grievance.

Take courage! You are not failing because you are a man or a woman. WE are failing because we are afraid. WE are injured because trauma has become our currency of empowerment. WE are alone because we no longer tolerate the authority of God’s natural jurisdiction.

We are trying to live as though there were no curse.

Speak Firm

So the question presses, not as accusation but as summons:

• What would change if you stopped managing fear and started crucifying it?

• What would your speech feel like if it were purged of grievance?

• What would life sound like if you quieted your own outrage?

The call is not to win but to refuse the governance of panic.

The stand is not to refuse cohesion, but to choose the slower fellowship. The life you want to live is the one where you release the accusations that make you bitter. No matter what assails you, under the good and gracious Father, you are free to trust that even when wounded grievously, nothing essential is at risk.

Peace is not the absence of pain. Peace is the release of accusation in the way of Jesus Christ. More than surviving, Christianity is trusting that nothing remains to be defended. Not even the story of the wound. For that is the glory that has already engraved your name in the palms of His hands.