Name: Jesse Powell
Location: United States
Religion: Atheist
Sex: Male
I am a Traditional Family Activist or TFA. I decided to start this group, this identity, for the purpose of providing an organization for secular people and others with weak ties to organized religious faith to join as a way of finding community among others who wish to bring back the traditional family as the dominant cultural norm and to have the practices and values of the traditional family supported and facilitated through law.
The Traditional Family Activist group that I see developing in the future is meant to serve a dual purpose; to facilitate members and supporters and readers in resuscitating traditional family practices in their own lives as well as to advocate for cultural and legal changes meant to bring back the traditional family for society as a whole.
Traditional Women’s Rights are very important as a value to uphold for TFAs. Women must be restored to their honorable role in society as women. The destruction of the protection and support women are entitled to by birth right has done great damage to the family and to the culture at large. Traditional Women’s Rights are meant to empower women in the feminine sphere so that women can serve their vital role as women once again.
Unconditional Chivalry is a very important value TFAs uphold. Men owe an unconditional Chivalrous obligation to provide for and protect women; all women. Society cannot survive without femininity and femininity cannot survive without Chivalry. Chivalry is therefore a must, not a choice; an unconditional obligation of men on behalf of women.
Obedience to the Superior Power or God is a very important value for TFAs. TFAs understand objective truth and objective reality; that the rules of life are imposed upon us by a force greater than ourselves, greater even than what we as humans collectively decide upon among ourselves. It is this greater truth, the Superior Power or God, that everything else is derived from.
The beginning of the Traditional Family Activist group is today; October 30, 2013. I Jesse Powell am the leader and founder. I hope to create a good environment that will be safe and secure for women and that will provide to men opportunities to practice their skills as the leaders of their families and leaders in the society at large; particularly as leaders in the struggle to restore the traditional family and Traditional Women’s Rights.
I owe a great debt of gratitude to the TWRAs. I joined the TWRAs on January 27, 2013 and sadly am resigning as a TWRA in order to start this new cause of the Traditional Family Activist. I am so grateful to have met Edita, The Radical One, Happy Housewife, Judithann Campbell, and Mamaziller in my journey as a TWRA. These women have changed my life so much. They showed me a secular group in favor of patriarchy was viable; something I didn’t know before I met them. This knowledge has changed my approach to cultural activism entirely. There is no way I would have started a group like the TFAs that I am launching today without the signal from the TWRA women that a group like the TFAs might do some good, might be something that women and men together will come to support.
I especially want to thank The Radical One for the great support she has shown to me, for the great trust she put in me, and most of all for her resiliency; her commitment to the TWRA cause to ensure that the TWRAs live on. The Radical One started the TWRAs with Edita on July 16, 2012 and she (The Radical One) is keeping the flame alive. Anyone out there not quite ready to join me and the TFAs, I urge you to support The Radical One and the TWRAs instead. The Radical One is doing a great service for the cause of Traditional Women’s Rights and the traditional family and I fully support her.
So, here’s to the future! May the Traditional Family Activists grow and prosper and spawn many imitators! It’s time to take back the culture and the law from the feminists! Come and join me!
Secular Patriarchy 
I think you put everything very well Jesse. Thank you for your articles. Here are the original TWRA beliefs for anyone interested:
http://whatswrongwithequalrights.wordpress.com/join-traditional-womens-rights-activists/
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For more detail regarding what TWRAs believe in as a group The Radical One, who is the founder of the TWRAs, has written an additional article:
What Does a Traditional Women’s Rights Activist Believe?
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If you are an atheist, emphasizing the secular, then what is this Higher Power you speak of, since you obviously cannot believe in it? A convenient fiction, necessary in order to give moral impetus to your belief in what ought to be? Where does this Superior Power decree chivalry, since obviously you can’t believe in a secular holy book, but then you logically can’t believe in a superior power, either, if you are secularist / atheist.
I’m really looking forward to seeing how you explain all this, rationally, and without contradicting yourself. Good luck!
the higher power is nature, it is everything we can not yet explain, it is why we are here and why we exist.
Man’s ‘state of nature’, in the social and individual aspect, is a common jumping off point in western philosophy.
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I, too, am waiting for a response from the author to Will S.’s question. I agree with the beliefs that are written here, but can’t see how they could come from a self-described atheist. Please explain.
Some people want to have their cake and eat it, don’t they? As if one can call oneself a disbeliever in God, yet invoke some transcendent force, yet not call it God, but mean pretty much the same thing.
I believe in the reality of what I call the “Superior Power” that is functionally equivalent to the God of religion in many ways but is not in actuality a literal supernatural God. Chaos spontaneously generates order; this “order” then being the basis and moral foundation of life. The “Superior Power” can then be thought of as that which generates this “natural order” of things. More specifically evolution is the particular mechanism that led to the creation of human beings and the differences between male and female in the human species. These inherited differences between male and female then lead to traditional patriarchy as the ideal social order for human beings to follow.
There is definitely an order to life; my belief being that this order comes as a byproduct of evolution; evolution being the “creator” and “designer” of human life. This is a view consistent with atheism as it doesn’t require a supernatural God to “organize things” or “put things together.” Instead the order we experience and see around us arises spontaneously through the mechanism of evolution.
I use the terminology of “Superior Power” that one is obligated to “obey” to emphasize that this natural order is “superior to” the will of man both individually and collectively; that this order of life is something “above” human will. Human will is not the creator or definer of that which is right and moral, instead that which is right and moral is imposed upon us “from above” by what I am calling the “Superior Power.”
In many ways I am mimicking religious terminology and religious ways of thinking very deliberately. My purpose is to give to atheists an effective way of understanding moral principles that doesn’t require them to accept belief in a supernatural God as creator first.
How can order truly arise from chaos? In physics, order tends towards disorder; I’m sure you know what entropy is. Why, when at the elemental level, would the natural tendency of matter and energy be towards disorder, would, at a higher level of complexity, the natural tendency for some reason be towards order? Wouldn’t any order that arises merely be apparent, and not truly real? And if humans are a natural product of evolution, isn’t any human desire a natural one, without any one being superior to another, simply some giving one’s genes a better chance at being passed on to future generations than others? But let’s grant for a moment that order somehow arises spontaneously within evolution – even if so, how does that imply that there is a moral order associated with this physical order? Do we see evidence of animals and plants behaving in moral ways? Of course not; they lack consciousness, and simply follow their biological imperatives. Yet we somehow have this thing called consciousness, this concept of right and wrong, not found in any of evolution’s other living being products. But how can we judge what is truly right or wrong, when there is no absolute frame of reference to compare it to, particularly when one sees no evidence of other products of evolution behaving in ways in accordance with it? One does not observe wolves or bears behaving in moral manners; on the contrary, in nature, we sometimes see some animals being selfish or predatory, and gaining for themselves and/or their offspring as a result of it. Should we follow their example? If not, why? And on what basis can you conclude that it is wrong for us to steal or kill, even if we observe some creatures that steal eggs from a nest and eat them; why would it be wrong for us to do similarly, when nature, the product of evolution, allows some species to survive this way? Whence this moral imperative ostensibly arising from evolution?
I will bet significant money, though not a huge amount, that this fighter for putting women back in their place as REAL MEN rule the world is (a) single, (b) lonely, (c) does not in fact have any acievements, in any field, that would justify his claims of superority.
So he lies in the internet fantasy world, where he is king of the castle and his imaginary future wife will obey his every whim because she knows just how superior you are, is sure easier than doing something. He is playing dungeons and dragons in real life: having proving to himself that he is actually a level 23 lawful good paladin, he is amazed no damsels in distress actually materialize.
He looks for theoretical reasons to “prove” to himself why he deserves the esteem, obedience, and sexual favor of women, and then blames “feminism” for them not seeing it and refusing to fall at his feet. But the simple truth is that women avoid him because he simply does not have any of the character, achievements, compassion , or any other quality that makes one worthy of estimation, obedience, or sex in the first place.
Code Green
Code Purple
Code Tan
Code Pink
Wait… Why do you say you’re an atheist, but then say that obedience ” Superior Power or God” is crucial? I agree with a lot of your articles, but it seems you’re coming from the traditional religious standpoint then. I was drawn to your site because it was named “Secular” Patriarchy. Could you explain better to your readers why you call yourself an atheist but endorse a religious standpoint? I read your response to another commenter with the same conundrum, but you might want a clearer explanation of what you mean by “superior power”, and especially of the use of the word “God”, since it clearly denotes a religious view. Do you mean a god-like sense of order? Even then, the sense of order you described seemed more spiritual than atheistic. I like your blog, but a better clarification might be needed to seem less contradictory.
https://thevirtuousatheist.wordpress.com/
I am an atheist and at the same time I very much believe that it is important that I strive to obey God or the Superior Power as much as possible. This not being a logical contradiction based on how I am defining what “God” and the “Superior Power” means.
God, how I define it, is good; the source of all that is good. God can also be thought of as the source of all order, what created the order around us that we are all a part of. The Superior Power then is just another name for God, another way of thinking about God or the God concept. So to obey God means to obey the good or to obey the natural order of things; obeying what is good is then how you become good.
So as an atheist I believe that I am to obey the good; since God is what is good therefore I am to obey God, the source of all that is good.
This might be characterized as the religious way of thinking but this religious way of thinking is perfectly plausible for an atheist to accept once the atheist defines God in a way that doesn’t contradict his atheism.
I actually consciously and deliberately promote the religious way of thinking about morality because I believe it is brilliant and very useful; it brings order to the otherwise very complicated subject of morality.
You do have a point. It does seem hard to reconcile arguments about morality and conservative views without some subjectivity. I struggle to find that balance on my own blogs too. While I choose not to use overtly religious imagery, for fear of confusion, I do acknowledge that it does take more than the usual liberal secular thought to express my opinions too as many are subjective. I have also written a sister blog for The Virtuous Atheist called A Lady of Reason for women who want more traditional femininity but from a non-religious platform. https://aladyofreason.wordpress.com/
Dear Jesse, pay Williebird no mind, his blog posts generally smell like bad fruit. No surprise, Paul, Timothy, Jude, Jeremiah, Isaiah warned their readers, long ago, about people who make religious noises and then turn right around and spew rubbish. No wonder people are turned off by anything to do with the Christian faith.
{Snort}
You again.
Then there’s the type of Christian who does nothing but complain about what other Christians say and do and think, and tries to seek approval from non-believers, protesting Not All Christians Are Like Those Ones Over There I’m Certainly Not I’m A Good One See.
I’ll leave it to our host to decide who is more in line with what the Bible actually teaches about sex roles and relations, me or you. 🙂