CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 157th Edition. How the Internet Emphases the Absurd and Marginal and Make it seem Significant. Pastor Brian Sauvé
One Brian Sauvé, senior pastor at Refuge Church in Ogden, Utah, has been much on the net recently due to some comments he made on vlog or some sort of web based video show providing for all to see how the net has served to emphasize the absurd and marginal, serving to make it seem like a big deal.
Refuge Church is a "Reformed Protestant" Church and Sauvé describes himself as "Reformed and Protestant, Paedobaptist, Postmillennial, and Patriarchal". The church describes itself as basically a solo scriptura group holding to 66 books of the Bible, rather than 73, which means that the don't believe in the 66 books of the Bible as the New Testament itself describes how sola scriptura is invalid and the omitted books that a German monk, who should never have been that, took out were done so based on his prejudice and a misunderstanding on what books of the Old Testament the Apostles were referring to.
Patriarchal Sauvé certainly is. And extremely so.
Sauvé in a September 18 podcast stated the following:
Women either shouldn't be on social media or any social media they have should be kind of a walled garden situation where some competent man is curating and blocking and directing and taking a look at what's going on. I have access to my wife's social media accounts and I have blocked—this is not an exaggeration—thousands of accounts. Thousands of them. She generally has very little idea of what is going on in the real social media because I've created a walled garden of cute goat videos.
We have normalcy bias in a certain direction. We consider normal what is actually insane. We consider normal women having unsupervised access to one another all the time. That's not normal.
We consider normal women having political rule. We consider normal women living unattached from a male—like a father, then a husband—for lengthy periods of time. You could fill in the blank with all of these modern feminist outworkings of the original feminist vision and what they've done is they've made women anxious, psychotic, depressed, miserable, and genocidally evil. And we just go, "Oh, that's normal.'"
People are going to hear me talking about, as my wife's head, monitoring her social media, and they're going to be like, "Brian is such a tyrant." You have normalcy bias for insane world. You're living in an insane asylum and you think it's the normal world and I'm saying, "No, we don't live in the insane asylum. We do what people did for thousands of years before today."
The interview went on and discussed how "crazy" it was to allow women to vote, something Hegseth fan boy has said of Doug Wilson in Idaho.
Unlike Wyoming, the least religious state in the country, Utah is the most religious state in the Union, and its religious landscape is dominated by the Latter Day Saints. It's not as Mormon as it once was, however, with about 55% of the residents of the state being in that faith. Culturally, however, they dominate it. Catholics are about 5%. About 25% claim no particular faith.The rest are mostly some sort of Protestant but there are, of course, Jews, Muslims, etc.
About 63% of the residents of Ogden are LDS. Catholics make up almost 9% of the population there. The rest would mostly be some sort of Protestant.
We'd note that Mormons, which Sauvé is not, are extremely socially conservative generally. That's important to note as while, at least in my experience, Mormons and some conservative Protestant religions do not get along, the overall cultural conservatism of Mormonism heavily impacts the Jello Belt. I'm not saying that to be mean or critical. Utah has some of the most well kept towns, including small towns, in the country and as a rule Mormons don't go in for the weird cultural silliness that is part of the current zeitgeist. Without condoning the tenants of their faith, their faith also causes them to have what some folks refer to as "nice families", as other conservative religious groups sometimes to. You'd probably have to get into Traditional Catholics in order to find a similarly family oriented well kept group of people.
The Culture of a People reflects upon the place they live. The views that Sauvé are not all that radical in the locality in which he is speaking them, as they reflect sort of broadly on the LDS, and specifically on some of the LDS, although most LDS would not hold them to the extreme that he does.
Now, as should be obvious, Pastor Sauvé is extremely socially conservative. Why should we care?
We shouldn't.
The church is indicated as having a "mid sized" congregation. His congregation ought to care what he thinks, and chances are they believe exactly what he does. This sort of extreme patriarchal view is quite limited and goes way beyond what even very conservative members of various other Christian faiths typically believe. It's also ironic in that women more than men were the foundation of the early Faith. Women brought men to it. There's a reason that Mary Magdalene is the "Apostle to the Apostles". And there's a reason that St. Brigid is so closely associated with St. Patrick.
But then, I'm an Apostolic Christian where strong women are the norm. Protestants can keep John Calvin, we'll take Joan d'Arc.
And Protestants can keep telling us that we shouldn't ask Mary for help, we're going to keep doing so.
Such a diminished view of women is odd, and sad.
It's also cultural and malformed.
But here's the thing. It's the Internet that has given voice to stuff like this. But for that, Sauve would be an unknown Protestant Pastor in the Jello Belt. Probably a lot of people in his own city wouldn't be able to tell you anything about him. I couldn't tell you anything about the two large warehouse type churches' pastors here. I'm sure that there are Protestants around here who hold the same beliefs. I just don't know who they are, and there aren't many of them.
The Internet is really giving voice to a lot of things, ideas and people who shouldn't have one. I don't know if Sauve was known before, but there's a whole host of like minded Protestants who show up on blogs all the time and spark Internet outrage. That outrage then circulates their message.
It's the same with people like Nick Fuentes, whose message is political and not religious, although there is some of that mixed in. But for the Internet, he'd just be a barely employed oddball.
It's one of the real challenges of our time. We need to ignore these people. They don't deserve a national audience.
