Anglican Renewal is a Substack publication run by a “grassroots group of clergy and laity in the Anglican Church of North America.” Their stated purpose is to “serve the ACNA by working towards healthy systems and institutional culture across the Province.” Earlier this month, one of their editors—a Talley Cross from the Diocese of the Mid-Atlantic—wrote what has since become their most widely shared post.
Cross’s article took aim at opponents of women’s ordination in the ACNA who, in her view, have fallen short of “basic Christian behaviour” in their disposition towards female clergy in the province. “Those who oppose women’s ordination,” she urged, “should acknowledge that women priests are legitimate ministers within the church’s current framework, even if their personal beliefs differ.” In bolded letters, she added:
ACNA priests on one side cannot continue to publicly question the legitimacy, faithfulness, or spiritual authority of those priests on the other without facing public discipline.
She then called for the Anglican Church In North America (Unofficial) group on Facebook to “drop the ACNA name” as she believes it “has become a forum for regularly denigrating women’s ordination and women priests.”
Three ordained members of the group in question—the Revs. Matt Kennedy (creator/admin), Jady Koch (moderator), and Nick Lannon—triggered a micro-controversy on Substack when they dismissed Cross’s remarks as evidence of an ascendant “Longhouse” in the ACNA. When they were presumably called upon to explain what they meant by the word, they linked to a 2023 First Things essay titled, “What Is the Longhouse?”
The essay’s pseudonymous author, a Twitter/X user known as L0m3z, was eventually identified in 2024 as Jonathan Keeperman—a former English professor who now splits his time between cohosting a Blaze Media podcast with Christopher Rufo and running the far-right publishing house Passage Press (hence the Substack controversy).
According to Lomez, “the Longhouse refers to the remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior”—especially speech. He argues that Longhouse speech norms, characterized by “consensus and the prohibition on ‘offense’ and ‘harm,’” are “enforced through punitive measures typical of female-dominated groups—social isolation, reputational harm, indirect and hidden force.” In other words: cancel culture. Thus, he issues the following rallying cry:
We must resist the soft authoritarianism of the Longhouse’s weepy moralism. We must not succumb to hysterical pleas for more safety, more consensus, more sensitivity.
In a clear nod to Costin Alamariu (better known as Bronze Age Pervert or BAP), i.e., the online personality who originally introduced the Longhouse thesis to dissident right circles, Lomez laments that the Longhouse “distrusts overt ambition”—that it “censures the drive to assert oneself on the world, to strike out for conquest and expansion” (emphasis mine).
BAP had written in Bronze Age Mindset that “anyone born with a will to conquest and expansion [emphasis mine again] will feel thwarted now, will awaken at a young age to find themselves in a world pervaded by an evil and smothering shadow that seeks to blot out their spirit and break them.” This smothering shadow is the Longhouse, and it is the reason why not even the likes of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Mark “Zuckerface” can “just kill a man and take his wife.”
That’s right. For BAP, a truly masculine world is one in which the richest and most powerful among us need not be restrained by such feminine concerns as the rights of other people. “The Constitution, the ideology, the doctrine of rights, is all so much nonsense and has nothing to do with any of this,” he writes. This is why he longs for the Bronze Age—a time when might made right and “men had life and force.”
When Anne Kennedy—wife to Rev. Matt and beloved subscriber to this newsletter—addressed concerns about the fascist undertones of the Longhouse framework two weeks ago, she suggested Helen Andrews’s “Great Feminization” thesis as a less charged, though equally effective, substitute. Andrews wrote in Compact magazine last October that “everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition.” Her primary concern was over the rule of law:
All of us depend on a functioning legal system, and, to be blunt, the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female. The rule of law is not just about writing rules down. It means following them even when they yield an outcome that tugs at your heartstrings or runs contrary to your gut sense of which party is more sympathetic.
In his response to Andrews’s viral piece, Richard Hanania pointed to Donald Trump’s “open contempt for the rule of law” as evidence that “it’s a mistake to think of a masculine-feminine spectrum that overlaps with a truth-seeking spectrum.” Once a prominent critic of feminization himself (so much so that Lomez cited him in the First Things piece), Hanania now admits to having “become disillusioned with the discourse around feminization.” Instead, he suggests that “if you’re worried about objectivity, well-functioning institutions, and the rule of law, then those are the debates we should be having.”
Gideon Scopes (yet another pseudonymous writer) echoed Hanania in Quillette magazine last December:
I’d rather see a Supreme Court with nine female justices who are committed to our Constitution than the confirmation of even one male justice who believes that the First Amendment is outdated or that offensive speech should be criminalised.
Scopes and Hanania, it appears, both believe that the fault lines we should care about are not between men and women, or even between masculinity and femininity for that matter. I am inclined to agree with them. The words “masculine” and “feminine” are simply too difficult to define when it comes to religious and sociopolitical matters. For example, while BAP believes that the constitutional democratic order many of us live under is inherently effeminate, the values and principles which undergird it—e.g., truth-seeking objectivity and the rule of law—are what mainstream voices typically have in mind when they advocate for a manlier approach to public life.
Is masculinity, then, primarily about conquest and expansion, or is it about justice and self-control? And is femininity the enemy of the conquistador, or is it the enemy of the cheeky comedian? Different people have different answers to these questions, and that’s the point. For the sake of a more meaningful discourse, therefore, perhaps it is best to prioritize precision in our speech.
Personally, I like the fact that I live in a world where Zuckerface is not allowed to kill me and steal my hypothetical wife. That said, I do like the fact that I publish my newsletter on a platform which also hosts the work of extremists like BAP. And similarly, I like the fact that boomers in my denomination have a Facebook group where they can communicate without the threat of imminent censorship (save, of course, for the internal witness of the Holy Spirit). Anyone who shares these values is someone I automatically trust—whether they be a man or a woman.
And with that, allow me to leave you with a (somewhat) tongue-in-cheek comment I posted earlier this week:
I am struck reading this by the words of the prophet Jeremiah:
"Thus saith the Lord of hosts the God of Israel unto all that are carried away captives, whom I have caused to be carried away from Jerusalem unto Babylon: Build ye houses and dwell in them, and plant gardens, and eat the fruit of them. Take ye wives, and beget sons and daughters, and take wives for your sons, and give your daughters to husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters, that ye may be increased there, and not diminished. And seek the peace of the city, whither I have caused you to be carried away captives, and pray unto the Lord for it: for in peace thereof shall ye have peace."
Regardless of the state of affairs we find ourselves and our culture in, and regardless of our feelings on this state of affairs, we are called, nevertheless, to grow where we are planted, and to do what small good we can with what we are given. Dreaming of how Babylon might be bettered may inform and guide our own action, but when we cease to do this and instead develop an obsessive need to return to our own ideal Jerusalem through sheer force of our will, then we have turned aside from our journey toward the truth and become lost in the Shadowed Forest. I am so thankful for this reminder as I make my own journey in a world given to enmity and hatred of our brothers and sisters.