Self esteem: get rid of it

We men need a slap in the face, and a hard one at that.  We need to wake up from our lethargy. In his essay, To the Men, Brother Andre Marie gives us both barrels.  It is as sobering as it is necessary.

A couple of quotes:

Gentlemen: Let’s talk about your self esteem. Get rid of it. Self esteem is garbage. Both low self-esteem and high self-esteem are based on pride and disordered self-love. These are not Biblical or Christian concepts, but worldly ones. We need to die to ourselves, not to feed the beast of pride. Self esteem is pride. The modern cult of self esteem stems from a pop psychology that hates God. How’s this for self esteem: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner”?

The spiritual writers remind us of the necessity of compunction of heart, contrition for sin, and humility. We must seriously cultivate those by acknowledging first our radical dependence on God for all our gifts of nature and of grace, and second, by acknowledging our sinfulness: our deserving of eternal damnation in hell by only one mortal sin (yet how many have we committed?), the countless venial sins that we’ve excused with lame excuses about relief from life’s difficulties, the bad example we’ve given others (including wives and children), our moral cowardice before a world that mocks Christ, and the fact that we don’t seem so swift as to “get it” when these things are pointed out to us. We go to confession, but then, like dogs returned to our vomit, we commit the same sins, we wallow in the same filth: Pornography. Infidelity by unchaste glances at other women. Ruining our own children’s innocence by letting the serpent of sexual impurity into our lives and therefore into our homes. Treating our wives like objects of lust on the one hand and fearing their displeasure on the other should we dare to assert our male patriarchal authority as head of the family. The failures pile up, and I’ve only touched a couple of commandments.


The more we cower in fear the more Goliath becomes emboldened.  The more we go with the flow the more the flow will propel us to disaster.

If we men begin to act like men then perhaps Churchmen will start acting like men.  And when that happens then and only then will the Satanic forces begin to quiver and to shake.

Read it all right here.