Saint Valentine's Day has its roots in pagan rituals which included rapes and orgies and blood sacrifices to pagan gods. This is not taught, not spoken of, not preached about and, likely, not known by many of our black pastors who, in an effort to appease their even less knowledgeable wives, dress up like fools and engage in ritualized behavior that is an offense to the cross. Rituals and practices designed, from their inception, to deny the holiness of God are inappropriate vehicles for evangelism. Some have argued that we’re just taking Satan's tools and turning them against him. By definition, Satan's tools are Satan's tools. By definition they are forever condemned and ineligible for inclusion in worship to God [I Corinthians 10:20-21].
Each
year, educated, thoughtful, mature grown
women transform into pouting children or harping shrews,
browbeating the men in their lives over St. Valentine’s Day.
Sisters who otherwise demand respect and want to be taken
seriously as equals, routinely insist on being infantilized and
condescended to on February 14th. Worse, in our black church
tradition, these sisters routinely emasculate their men,
foolish, stupid men, by dressing them up in red and pink for
church-sponsored “sweetheart balls;” events where weak-willed,
low-information “Christian” men reject God and allow themselves
to be led astray by what the Apostle Paul called “silly women
laden with sin” [2 Timothy 3:6]. These foolish women—yes, your
girlfriend, your wife, your mother—know nothing about what this
holiday actually means (the color red stands for the blood
spilled at pagan sacrifices) and, frankly, don’t care. Most men
I know, including most pastors, care absolutely nothing for
Valentine’s Day, but dare not ignore it out of fear of their
wives. Fear of their wives. The anxiety we brothers go
through every February is in direct contention to God’s plan for
both men and women. Men are to love and protect their wives, not
fear them. And, frankly, if men were doing a better job of it,
their women would likely not be as psychotically invested in
Valentine’s Day. Similarly, God’s plan for our sisters is not
for them to invest in some ritual, least of all a ritual of
pagan origin. The dour browbeating is an artifact of our
sisters’ insecurity and neediness. Sisters: it is God’s will for
you to be a whole person and a complete person, not someone so
emotionally starved that she elicits “love” under threat.
Brothers: caving into this nonsense denies God and crucifies
Christ afresh. I can’t believe how many of our brothers actually
go out and buy a red suit. A red suit. You look like an
idiot, which is actually appropriate. Capitulating to her
insecurity in rejection of God condemns you as one. That precious few pastors I know—I mean, I
can count them on one hand—take a stand against such nonsense
deeply saddens me. And I can only imagine how God feels about it
all.
In five decades of breathing, I’ve not once met a man who looked
forward to Valentine’s Day or saw it as anything other than a
dreaded day of obligation. The typical refrain is, “I just don’t
wanna hear it,” a kind of “grin and bear it” get-it-over-with
dreary task of planning and spending or facing the consequences
of Annual Child Day; his wife or girlfriend melting down to
pre-pubescence. What’s even more disturbing: most women I’ve
known are fully aware their man is committing to this ritual out
of obligation and not out of his own impetus. I’ve yet to meet a
woman who cared. She’s earned this. She has this coming. Pony up
or face the consequences.
This is not love. This is not even close to love, has nothing
whatsoever to do with love. And this dysfunction is sewn into
the fabric of our existence, this annual drudgery, which many
like myself have come to resent. Not the sentiment so much as
the demand: do this or else. Love demands nothing. Love does not
insist on having its own way. Our sisters have been
indoctrinated into this mess by their mothers and pass this
disease onto our daughters who will grow up and browbeat their
husbands. This business is most especially ridiculous for
Christians because it denies most everything about Christ and
blasphemes the Gospel by trying to create a mix-in smoothie of
the Gospel of Jesus Christ and pagan idolatry, which the bible
itself repeatedly condemns. I’ve explained that to our sisters
many, many times. They don’t care. They are that ignorant. Yes,
you, sister. You’re that ignorant. You want what you want,
period. And you’re prepared to turn a blind eye and deaf ear to
the Gospel, and undermine your relationship with our man by
pouting and holding your breath and making him absolutely dread
this day of the year and resent you for it. And you don’t care,
long as you get what’s coming to you. This is the foolishness of
women, hammered into them by their mothers who had it hammered
into them by their mothers: the insecurity and need for
validation, the chronic childishness surrounding what is, by
definition, a pagan ritual that denies Christ.
Pastors who indulge this ritual, even obliquely, deny Christ and
really don’t deserve to be called “pastor” at all. This ignorant
tribalism demeans and oppresses women, perpetuating for all men
the stereotype of the woman as a child. Even some of the
roughest, baddest, most aggressive sisters in the church, some
of the best educated minds and most respected leaders, turn into
*idiots* on St. Valentine’s Day. Mass psychosis; it’s all
emotion over intellect, women slipping into depression or
committing acts of rage because “he forgot.” Female pastors—pastors—bringing
this mess into God’s House, emasculating the men by dressing
them up in “holiday” pink and red. And you stupid brothers allow
yourself to be cowed like that, to be unmanned like that, just
to “keep peace” in your house. Which misses the point, brothers,
that it’s your house. There’s not usually a point in a
relationship where we ask the wife to stop being a woman, while
women are constantly—from the first moments of a
relationship—trying to strip their men of their manhood. Trying
to “fix” him or rehabilitate him or bend him to their will. Only
to lose respect for him once she accomplishes that. Women don’t
respect some dimwit standing there in a red suit. It’s like
putting a sweater on a dog; it’s what kids do, dress up the dog.
She’ll be angry if you wear normal clothes but beneath her anger
and disappointment is the visceral reassurance that her man is a
real man who can’t be manipulated. I’ll take the anger and
disappointment over the dog sweater any day.
Saint Valentine's Day has its roots in pagan rituals which
included rapes and orgies and blood sacrifices to pagan gods.
This is not taught, not spoken of, not preached about and,
likely, not known by many of our black pastors who, in an effort
to appease their even less knowledgeable wives, dress up like
fools and engage in ritualized behavior that is an offense to
the cross.
There is little if any actual evangelism being conducted by
black churches in this city. No evangelism, but most every black
church I know is supportive of these pagan “Sweetheart” balls.
Church folk gatherings which do little, if anything, to tell
people about Jesus and which offer Christ to no one. But they
raise money. They are festive, more pageantry and celebration of
ourselves.
Pastors: if you are allowing or promoting any Valentine’s Day
activities, you are lost in sin. You are encouraging your people
to sin.
...the sacrifices of pagans are offered to demons, not to God,
and I do not want you to be participants with demons. 21 You
cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons too; you
cannot have a part in both the Lord's table and the table of
demons. —I Corinthians 10:20-21
Few, if any, women I know speak in any doctrinal tones
whatsoever when it comes to these idiotic “Sweetheart” balls.
God is simply not in the equation, not present in the planning,
and makes His presence known only in the blessing of the food.
God is simply not in these things, yet there’s Pastor, dolled up
like a red and white hyena, trying to keep the wife happy.
The truth is, gentlemen, you have an obligation to appreciate
and love your wives every day you draw breath. There shouldn’t
need to be some day on the calendar to remind you to love her.
Loving her is your responsibility [Ephesians 5:25]. Valentine’s
Day finds energy and inertia only in our failure to honor the
covenant we made with God and the women we love. I shouldn’t
need to observe some invented day to prove I care about you. I
shouldn’t need a special day to remind me who you are or remind
me to demonstrate how much you mean to me. You should be able to
see that, to know that, every day of your life. A man who really
loves his wife should buy her a house, not a stupid ring.
Engagement rings are not biblical. The biblical model is
dowry, the bride’s price: an investment, a demonstration of
means to care for the wife and family. Diamonds do not replace
God’s promise. Wasting ten grand on a wedding is idiotic. Buy a
house. Get a man-made diamond—the expensive ones are not
Zirconium but are actual diamonds and cost a fraction of natural ones.
Buy her a car. Get her kids out of
public school and into a private one. I can make a list, pages
long, of better ways to spend your money than on some frivolous
jewelry. But sister will lose her mind, and her respect for you,
if you don't put a huge rock on her finger. Her ignorant friends
and family will shake their heads dolefully, presuming you to be
cheap because you'd rather put the money into a down payment on
a home. That's how twisted this thing is, this ignorance
breathed into sisters one generation to the next. She doesn't
care about the down payment on the house or the practical
investment. She wants that rock. She will pout, perhaps
secretly, and wallow. She wants a big wedding and a fabulous
honeymoon, even if you two don't own a pot to piss in. She's
that ignorant, which really isn't her fault: it's the disease
passed down through the generations, The Woman As A Child. And
then she gets mad when we treat her as the child she actually
is.
Sisters: grow up. Seriously. I’m just sick about this. About our sisters being so willingly infantilized, hinging their entire self-esteem and/or a man’s worth on the size of the rock he buys her. The value of your husband should hinge on his commitment to Christ and to his family. And you should be mature enough to know God and to put practical matters ahead of childish tribal practice.
