Not His Market

The most effective lies are 90% truth. Satan proved that in the Garden of Eden, and he’s been exploiting the technique ever since.

Likewise, the most persuasive rhetoric ignores all inconvenient exceptions to its proclamations. Discussing the outliers takes time a rhetorician does not have. After all, rhetoric is about making a pithy point with emotionally compelling force, so shorter is better. In deliberately generalizing rather than carefully debating all possible pros and cons, a sophist makes an argument that hits his target audience right where they live, even if he leaves some significant percentage of the population stone cold.

Not his market. Too bad for them.

Women in the Workforce

This recent short video on YouTube has Joel Webbon, senior pastor at Covenant Bible Church in Austin, Texas, reacting to the video of another popular (female) masculinist YouTuber. Webbon uses short, sharp rhetorical shots on social media to sell his agenda to young men, especially those in the Reformed camp. He takes a minute or so to set out what he says is a biblical position on women in the workforce:

“We can pretend that, you know, women are fulfilling these needs in the workforce, and men wouldn’t do it and men couldn’t do it. That’s simply not true. There’s really only one job that a woman can do better than a man, and that is the job of a homemaker, the job of a mother, the job of a wife, being a lady of the hearth, being “keepers at home”, as the Bible teaches in Titus chapter 2. That is your only edge, that is your only monopoly, and you should do it to the glory of God.

Everywhere else outside of that, you will lose. You are inferior. Men have been designed by God to lead in society, to work in society. We have been equipped and built by God to do this better than women. Don’t make it a competition. You will find yourselves politely ushered back into the kitchen.”

So now, I ask you, who is Webbon’s target market? It’s surely not women, even though he directly addresses them in the video.

Firing Up the Base

Again, this is rhetoric, not deep dialectic, in which one man persuades another with logic and data. YouTube shorts are not effective vehicles for dialectic, and Webbon doesn’t even attempt it. He goes straight for the jugular, which makes sense from his perspective, because he’s appealing to his personal fan base, which is male, young and angry. So his comments to women are short, sharp and divisive: “You will lose.” “You are inferior.” “You will find yourselves politely ushered back into the kitchen.”

How do you figure that’s going to play with women, the group Webbon is allegedly addressing? My guess would be not well. For starters, his delivery is nasty and inflammatory, notwithstanding the fact that his actual thesis ⁠— that staying home and raising a godly family is better and more biblical than carving out the most glorious personal career path ⁠— remains useful spiritual advice for young Christian women either already married or looking for a husband. That’s fine for Webbon, because all he’s really doing is firing up his base. You can practically see the fists pumping behind the monitors and cellphone screens of under- and unemployed Christian twenty-something males as their would-be-mentor builds up to his mic-drop moment.

For a man who purports to be a pastor, Christian apologist, leader of men and defender of the faith and nation, that’s a major problem. If Webbon is only pretending to dress women down to look macho, then he has integrity issues. If he is actually speaking to half the human population this dismissively, his manner is so abrasive and tone deaf that it’s entirely self-defeating.

Different But Valued

It’s a good scam. Like Satan’s lies, Webbon’s rhetoric is 90% truth. God designed men and women differently.

Women complement men and do some things we can’t do at all, like childbearing, and some things most of us don’t do well, like keeping a home and serving as primary caregiver to young children and seniors. Women are especially effective at meeting urgent needs, maintaining a routine efficiently, and responding sensitively where sensitivity is required.

God designed men to lead, direct and provide financially. Most of us are long-term, big picture thinkers, able to deal with abstractions and geared to prioritize the important over the urgent without getting worked up about it. We are good at keeping the lights on, the car running and the roof from leaking, and prefer problem solving and practicality to emoting and mutual affirmation.

So then, any society that encourages women to leave the home and occupy jobs and careers that men traditionally filled is going to find itself either perpetually banging large numbers of square pegs into round holes, or else squaring the holes so that the original pegs no longer fit well into them. Western society has done lots of both over the last seventy years, and that’s the social crisis Webbon’s addressing. For the most part, he is not wrong.

Women and Wives

Webbon’s most obvious unforced error here is that he does not distinguish between women and wives. In the first century Near East, when the New Testament was written and most women were wives, Webbon’s “get back to the kitchen” rhetoric might have made a lick of sense. In 2026, when only 44.3% of Canadian women are married (minus the female share of the 1.1% same-sex Canadian marriages, in which the relationship dynamics of Webbon’s ideal biblical scenario play no part), the obvious question becomes “Joel, what are we supposed to do with more than half the women you are talking down to?”

Let’s face it, no small number of women were never in the kitchen in the first place, and never would be, at least not to make supper for a husband. That was true in the first century, and it’s quintuply true today. Widows. Divorcees. Single women by choice, fate or necessity. Married women with husbands unemployed, under-employed or permanently disabled. All need to make a living and there’s no compelling reason why they should accept a lower-tier position in the workplace hierarchy if they can do the job. Webbon assumes they can’t, or that a man could always do it better. I’m not surprised to find that coming from a career pastor with little or no experience actually working for a living over, under or beside women, but in my experience he’s flat out wrong. Sure, men excel in professions that require physical strength and stamina, or that prize masculine attributes like decisiveness, risk-taking and accountability. These are valuable in their place. In other modern professions, such attributes are no advantage at all. More importantly, I would rather receive nursing or hospice care from a woman than a man every single time.

No Cultural Vacuum

The idea that all women can find their primary satisfaction in careerism is a feminist lie. They were indeed designed to fill a much more important role. But a workforce in which women who want or need to work have no opportunity to show their chops and be compensated for the value of their labor is one in which I prefer not to participate. I have had excellent experiences working with women, most of whom were in the workforce because they had no other choice.

Let’s agree with this: in any biblically based society, more women would be home having children and raising families. More should be. No argument there. Women would be happier. Men would be happier. But that is not our society, for a multiplicity of reasons. Anyone fresh out of grade school ought to pick that up immediately. The feminization of the workforce did not happen in a cultural vacuum. It is a product of feminism, individualism, secularism, materialism, multiculturalism, over-education, industrialization, urbanization, the extension of childhood into the late twenties and early thirties, the devaluation and breakdown of the nuclear family, the Welfare system, the Nanny State, the Pill, legalized abortion and half a zillion other factors … yes, including masculine selfishness and abdication.

Dozens of issues need addressing before any Westernized society on the planet could think seriously about politely ushering vast numbers of its women “back into the kitchen”. Urging them there without considering these contributing factors is tilting at windmills.

Just Not Interested

Let’s be fair to Joel Webbon. He has almost surely considered his position on women in the workforce more deeply and intelligently than any one-minute bit of commentary can fairly display. YouTube is giving us a snippet of his philosophy, not the entire package. That’s the format, and that’s what you get. But my point is this: whether Webbon has considered how to usefully employ 56-plus percent of the female population or not, the fact remains that this video does not address it, and is therefore entirely useless as a rhetorical tool for anything other than riling up young men and feeding their frustration. It does that perfectly. For women, it does little more than confirm their prejudices about Christian men.

Should we blame Webbon for that? Frankly, yes. Absolutely. Trying to be fair to the man, I considered the possibility that somebody else was using a snippet of a longer Webbon conversation out of context and failing to do justice to a more nuanced and well-considered position. But no, that’s not the case. The video short traces back to the NXR Studios YouTube channel: “Unapologetically Christian. Unapologetically Right Wing. The New Christian Right” in which Webbon is definitely a player. The New Christian Right website shows Webbon as the foremost of seven “voices” behind the organization and the movement.

No, this is Webbon’s personal video presentation, and he’s put it together with a specific purpose in mind. If he’s failed to respond to world’s most obvious criticism of his lame argument, it’s either because he’s oblivious to the way he presents to more than half the population, or because he’s not interested in addressing women at all. Perhaps that’s a job for someone else, or maybe he figures they’ll be going “back to the kitchen” by force.

The Game is Afoot

What’s the game then? I have no idea. Is Webbon just interested in self-promotion, making a career out of controversy? Does he imagine hordes of riled-up young Christian men may be able to effectively persuade the other 85% of society to fall in line with the NXR agenda? If so, I am very curious how he proposes to reach out to slightly more than half of society, because this sort of presentation will not get the job done.

But maybe women are just not his market.

Rhetoric is a great tool, and the right sort is effective with both sexes. But nobody likes being dismissed, sneered at or implicitly threatened. Frankly, no man appreciates other men lecturing his wife. We all know how well that works.