Post-Pandemic Resorting

This is kind of a meandering mind dump on three semi-related ideas: women and trends, milkmaids and homesteaders, and post-pandemic fallout.

My influence exploded just as we entered the pandemic. A lot of the podcasting I'd been doing and my social media started getting lots of attention, and that lined up with us planting East River, which we announced in July of 2020 and started in December.

You can't make up the number of emails and phone calls I got from people trying to sort through a myriad of topics. As I'm sure you remember, the pandemic caused huge numbers of Americans to question things they had never questioned before. It also kicked off a re-sorting, where people fled liberal and middle-of-the-road churches for something much more conservative. They also fled progressive areas for more conservative ones, which usually broke down roughly to fleeing urban areas for more rural ones.

And since I was a very visible patriarchal Presbyterian planting a church in rural Ohio, a lot of these people reached out to me. Some even relocated here from all over the country.

One of the things that became immediately clear to me was that at least 75% of the time, it was the women, the wives, who were behind these big shifts. It started to remind me of that annoying quip that the man may be the head of the family, but the woman is the neck who turns the head. Sadly, that's what I was seeing.

A lot of these people were new to Reformed theology. Almost every time, the man told me that it was actually his wife who had gotten him into it, that she had been listening to some podcast or YouTube course long before he did. She was often the one doing the research on whether or not the so-called vaccine was a wise decision. She was the one who really fell in love with the idea of homeschooling and homesteading.

In many cases, this was simply because the guy was working longer hours, and she had time to do what we'll just generously call research.

But all this to say, it is my assessment that the Reformed resurgence, the surging interest in biblical sexuality, flat eartherism, and many other trends that exploded during the pandemic were driven by women.

Now, I hate that I have to write like this, but I do. This is not me saying that those issues in and of themselves are feminine. They're not. But the reason they exploded the way they did was because of women online and men who were under their influence.

One humorous example my wife and I noticed a couple of years back was what we called the milkmaid trend.

These women would pop into our lives dressed like milkmaids. You know, kind of long, plain, baggy dresses. I just assumed they came from Mennonite backgrounds. But we would become friends on Facebook, and then when someone commented on an old photo of theirs, it would pop up in my feed, and I would see that just a year ago they were dressing extremely normal.

And I would notice that, not every time, but often, when a woman started dressing like a milkmaid, her husband would start dressing much more old-timey, too, like they were going to raise a barn or something.

Now, I don't care if you dress this way. I don't think there's anything wrong with it. Probably the biggest issue is that it's odd, and it makes you a little more of a spectacle than I think you should be with your dress, in the sense that it calls attention to yourself. But there are certainly worse ways to dress. I appreciate people who allow some mystery in this life.

The issue that stuck out to me was that this was clearly something very new, and it was a female-driven trend that the male, the man, followed. And I found it to be kind of a pattern during the pandemic with certain demographics.

The women were the leaders. The men were the followers.

Now, of course, these women were trying to help their husbands, and that's what a good woman does. But here we are on the other side of the pandemic, and lots of trends are starting to fizzle out.

Take homesteading.

I grew up on a farm, and I know exactly what actual farm work is like. I knew I didn't want to be a farmer. But the idea of having chickens and a large garden did appeal to me to an extent. So I called our house and several acres a farm, and it was, in the sense that it was a hobby farm.

But I never wanted to be a true homesteader.

Some of the more intense arguments I've had with my wife in the last decade have been over the extent to which I was willing to participate in farming. My work elsewhere would generate exponentially more fruit for my family, financially and otherwise, than selling farm-fresh eggs on the roadside. Plus, I just don't like it that much.

Anyhow, my wife was really into aspects of it, and she still is. Right now, we have zero chickens and are kind of pulling back and figuring out what level makes sense for this stage of our life. But it took some pretty animated conversations to get us both on the same page.

And part of that came from me talking to her about what I saw happening in the lives of YouTubers and social media accounts that sold everything to go start a homestead in the middle of nowhere.

I had subscribed to a bunch of these, and one of the things that stuck out to me was that the majority of the time, the woman was way more into it than the man was. And I thought that would eventually lead to severe relational tension.

Many of those channels have come to a dramatic end, and a few have ended in divorce.

Again, I hate that I must write this way, but of course, that doesn't mean all homesteads are driven by women or that all homesteading will lead to divorce. And of course, there were some men who were the drivers of it, and of course, some men love it.

Of course, of course, of course.

I must write this way because of ADHD brain and the inability to listen to the main argument that's being made.

Anyhow.

It is quite the thing to accept a system of theology because it's trendy. It's quite the thing to leave where you've been living for years and move across the country to join a new church in a new community as part of some broad trend.

It is ironic that the popularity of biblical patriarchy at the moment has been tied to women leading their husbands into truth. But from where I've stood, that's what I've seen.

Now, here's a relatively new trend that I would put at about 18 months old, maybe two years at the most.

A lot of these men who followed their wives into homesteading, Amish dress, or even Reformed theology are starting to assert themselves.

They're saying, "You know what? I'm not a Calvinist. I think Calvinism is horrible."

"You know what? I'm not a farmer. I hate farming."

"You know what? I don't want to live in the country and be part of this community. It's not what I thought it was."

"You know what? I'm going back to our old church. This new church wasn't what it sold us to be."

So the great sorting that we saw during the pandemic, the movement in theology and behavior, is yet being sorted again.

Now, some people have experienced powerful, lasting changes, and the women were merely helping while the men were leading. They did make good decisions, and they did land in communities they've gotten deeply involved in. They weren't idealists without foundation. They were people with a clear vision, and I am so thankful that I have many of those people in our church.

But man, chicks love trends.

And men, if you love the woman God's given you, you're going to need to be a check on the pressure to give in to what will be passé in a few months.

Painting: Gerard ter Borch