The Woke Cult Isn’t ‘Hyper’- Christian, but Post- and Anti-Christian

I’ve written here before about the bestselling, gifted historian Tom Holland, and he was gracious enough to do an in-depth, three-part interview five years ago for The Stream about the thesis of his book, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. The Gospel taught the world for the first time that the weak and oppressed didn’t essentially deserve their lot in life, and that victims can be heroes, since Jesus was both par excellence.

The Church was born in an age when sophisticated people with advanced educations, who’d engage in debates about virtue, also went to gladiatorial games and laughed as the slaves there fought each other to the death. They felt no cognitive dissonance. They washed off any blood that spattered them and went back to reading Plato.

The same people would routinely take unwanted children, such as handicapped boys or inconvenient girls, and leave them outside to die–with perfectly clear consciences. Patriotic Romans would howl as thousands of civilians conquered in foreign wars were marched into Rome in shackles to serve as field hands or sex slaves. No glimmer of sympathy was expected, but rather the sentiment, “Sucks to be you. Glad I’m a Roman!”

Subhumans and Human Weeds

It’s hard for us to imagine such a world, except if we go back a few decades. Then we can read about highly organized, brutal dictatorships in Germany and Russia that proudly rejected the “sentimental,” “humanitarian,” “bourgeois” myth that human life is sacred and each of us has God-given rights.

But you don’t have to read Hitler’s Darwinist rants or Stalin’s Marxist tomes. You can just check what Margaret Sanger said about the children of the poor–whom she scorned as “human weeds” the federal government ought to eradicate. And her organization, Planned Parenthood, is still energetically doing that, with millions of dollars in taxpayer funding every year.

Love Thy Neighbor … by Aborting Him

The evils we face today are mostly not such in-your-face, blatant rejections of Christianity’s moral heritage. The exposure of Nazi and Communist crimes against humanity poisoned the well for openly elitist, callous worldviews. What we face instead are movements that hijack the Gospel, hollow out its flesh and wear it as a skin suit, to make a Cargo Cult out of generically Christian sentiments.

Indeed, the Left routinely twists the very words of Jesus to promote the doctrines of demons, as California Governor Gavin Newsom did with his “Love thy neighbor” billboards promoting abortion. Woke churches made a literal martyr out of career criminal George Floyd, and pretend that sexual weirdos and fetishists are the “marginalized” people the Church ought to center on serving.

Did the Church Hatch This Monster?

Is there something in the heart of the Gospel itself that makes the woke movement inevitable? Did the Church unleash a cultural movement that would someday turn and devour it? Holland wrote something to that effect in the final chapter of his book, suggesting that the Woke movement was the logical culmination of Christian morality.

Investor Peter Thiel (who sponsored a conference in Florence where I got to meet Holland) seems to agree. Shane Morris over at Breakpoint noted recent remarks by Thiel:

Christianity, the main religion of the Western world, always takes the side of the victim … And maybe you should think of wokeness as ‘ultra-Christianity,’ or ‘hyper-Christianity.’ It’s just like an extreme intensification … and there’s no forgiveness … you still have Original Sin, and you have all these bad things that happened in the past, the past is terrible, and you can never overcome it. But there surely is a religious interpretation of this…

Morris explained:

Thiel then pointed out that although churches and organized religion have been in decline, people have not become “atheist” or “rationalist” en masse. Instead, they have adopted a “woke religion” that borrows Christianity’s belief about the meek being blessed and the least being greatest, but without Christianity’s God, Savior, theology, or Church. This woke religion also lacks atonement, and so it endlessly demands that the “oppressed” be elevated above their “oppressors.”

I wrote along similar lines here years ago, warning of the Great Awokenment as a diabolical parody of authentic Christianity, one rooted in the oldest, most insidious heresy in Church history: that of Marcion. That early Church celebrity convert thought that Jesus had come to preach an entirely new religion to free us from the cruel, tyrannical “God” of the Hebrew Bible — who wasn’t His father but His enemy.

That’s So Old Testament

And that’s how too many Christians speak today when they want to embrace sexual “diversity,” or open borders, or pacifism, or socialism — none of which can be reconciled with the commands God gave the Jews.

Today’s “rainbow” believers reject the timeless teachings God revealed to His own people over centuries in favor of comfortable modern readings of a few Gospel passages. They hack Christ out of the context in which He meant for every word He spoke to be understood, the Law which He came not to abolish but to fulfill. Once that context is gone, you can use that cartoon, ahistorical Jesus to justify whatever secular elites have decided to approve.

For these modern post-Christians Jesus’s treatment of the woman caught in adultery wasn’t mercy shown to a sinner, but the embrace of a “marginalized sex worker” and rebuke of “patriarchal” and “heteronormative” restrictions on sexual diversity. Jesus’s praise for the Good Samaritan? It’s a fable about the evils of xenophobia, and nothing more. And so on. Many statements by Pope Francis and the cronies he promoted to high ranks in the church, who are now gathered to elect his successor, were political hijacks of this kind.

A Quick Litmus Test

How can we tell that these woke post-Christians aren’t sincere, just badly misguided? By their fruits you shall know them. Here’s just one easy example.

How many of the religious figures today caterwauling about the Trump administration removing illegal alien members of criminal gangs spoke up when the Biden administration simply lost track of more than 300,000 unaccompanied immigrant children? Those kids just disappeared, some of them into slave labor and others into the hands of sex traffickers. Where was the outrage?

If someone today confronts you with the charge that Trump’s modest effort to remove some of the more than 10 million people lawlessly imported into America is “cruel” or “inhuman,” demand from that person one thing: evidence that he spoke up about all those missing children, the realest victims of our chaotic immigration regime. Demand to see social media posts, letters to the editor, something to show a consistent concern for the truly vulnerable.

He will have nothing to show you. That’s how you’ll know which team he’s really on. These people aren’t “hyper-Christians” but post- and anti-Christians, wearing Gospel ethics like a sheep’s skin on a wolf. And to such people you can offer the eminently Christian, Gospel response:

You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. (John 8:44)

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.

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