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The Great Awakening in mid-18th century colonial America, influenced by the biblical preaching of George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards, led to the American Revolution. Some say we’re now in the Great Awokening with aspirations for a different kind of revolution, perhaps something closer to that of the early 20th century Russian Bolsheviks. In 2018, Andrew Sullivan wrote in the New Yorker:
And so the young adherents of the Great Awokening exhibit the zeal of the Great Awakening. Like early modern Christians, they punish heresy by banishing sinners from society or coercing them to public demonstrations of shame, and provide an avenue for redemption in the form of a thorough public confession of sin. “Social justice” theory requires the admission of white privilege in ways that are strikingly like the admission of original sin. A Christian is born again; an activist gets woke. To the belief in human progress unfolding through history — itself a remnant of Christian eschatology — it adds the Leninist twist of a cadre of heroes who jump-start the revolution.
The awakening of the Bolsheviks stirred from a 19th century wokeness, the impetus of which proceeding from the utter failure of the state church in Europe in the 18th century, Jean Jacques Rousseau’s
Social Contract and
Discourse on Inequality, Hegelian dialectical materialism, and then the writings of Karl Marx.
The equality of the true church comes in the first instance of actual awakening. Peter calls it the obtaining of “like precious faith” “through the righteousness of God and our Savior Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 1:1). At that moment Paul writes the Galatian churches: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). This doesn’t come through human progress (progressivism) but by Divine achievement by means of the power of the gospel. God receives all the glory.
Wokeness doesn’t give God glory because it is a human endeavor. Atheists can be woke. Professing evangelicals today just have their own version of wokeness where they have more common ground with reprobates than true converts of Jesus Christ.
God produces equality, real equality. Progressivism inoculates against the real thing like the Pharisaism of Jesus’ day. The Pharisees were interested in the Messiah coming to bring in a physical kingdom that delivered from physical oppression. Nothing said oppression more than poverty to the Pharisee. They condemned anyone who wasn’t as woke as they were, including Jesus.
Jesus didn’t come with a message to deliver from physical oppression. He said God will care about you greater than He does the lilies of the field and many sparrows (Matthew 6:25-34). Don’t worry about these physical things. Jesus said, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness.” Wokeness reverses this. It says seek first a physical kingdom of this world. This was a direct contradiction by Jesus of the Pharisees. To enter the kingdom, Jesus preached, “Repent,” “be born again,” and “believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.” That wasn’t a popular message then and it isn’t today.
It is much easier to preach the wokeness of equality, inclusion, and poll tested words mantled with religious undertones: “rest,” “encourage,” “empathy,” and even “self-love.” True, biblical Christianity uses words like submission, authority, judgment, obedience, reverence, suffering, and solemnity. This clashes with the sensual feelings of wokeness and niceness.
The root sin of Pharisaism is pride. The world will be impressed with the kingdom you bring in through your efforts. Look what you have done. It’s not poverty in spirit. It is voluntary humility, that puts on a very sad face, like the Pharisees with their self-bruising to make them look sacrificial in a photo-op. Preaching the gospel isn’t popular with the world. Like with Jesus, the world will hate you with preaching. They loove the social activism, the free Christmas tree and canned goods.
The Lord Jesus Christ provides temporal bread. He made bread and fish in John 6 to feed fifteen or so thousand including women and children. He didn’t keep feeding. He said, “I am the Bread of Life.” The multitudes went away. The woke crowd says, feeding is our program. We’ll keep feeding and feeding. It’s a popular, temporal, self-indulging message. They include Jesus, except that He’s a reinvented Jesus, another Jesus, who fits with their activism.
Wokeness sedates someone against a true awakening, like someone with his brain in a vat. It’s like the sleepiness someone feels after a big turkey dinner. He doesn’t hunger and thirst for actual righteousness, because he’s been fed with what Jesus called “the meat that perisheth” (John 6:27). They serve up a huge platter of “meat that perisheth,” even a vegan version on the menu. It might also come with a mimosa to provide a bit of the metaphysical popular in Ephesus and Corinth and the temple of Diana, served with the seductive rhythms of popular music in the background. It is a spiritual experience, except not the Holy Spirit, rather the spirit of this age.
In my title, I conveniently called this the coronavirus to the church. A virus doesn’t live on its own. It invades a living cell and reproduces off its intricate machinery until the cell is dead. Woke Christianity attaches itself to a church and kills it by entering it and then reproducing itself until the church is dead. It changes every doctrine. God is a different God. Jesus is a different Jesus. The church is now a commune. The gospel changes. The future kingdom has arrived with the one that people want right now, not the pie in the sky stuff preached by actual biblical preachers. In the end, the church isn’t woke. It’s a corpse killed by the virus of Woke “Christianity.”
Woke Christianity isn’t really inclusive. It’s like slapping “fine dining” on the greasy spoon. It doesn’t include godly parents who warn against it and anyone else who preaches historic Christianity. Sullivan writes:
And religious impulses, once anchored in and tamed by Christianity, find expression in various political cults. These political manifestations of religion are new and crude, as all new cults have to be. They haven’t been experienced and refined and modeled by millennia of practice and thought. They are evolving in real time. And like almost all new cultish impulses, they demand a total and immediate commitment to save the world.
He used the words “cult” and “cultish,” but I’m going to step out and agree on Woke Christianity. If it is not a cult, then it is cultish. It does not harmonize with historic Christianity in almost any way. It’s an impulse for something right now.
Ghosting is the form of separation for the inclusivists. Anyone who rejects their profanity and corrupt doctrine is toxic. This is how physical kingdoms are brought in. It’s how the revolution succeeds. To Robespierre, one of the fanatics of the French revolution, the purveyor of the guillotine said, “On ne fuit pas d’omelette sans casser des oeufs.” Translated, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” Deep down this is an angry group. You’ve seen them. They like the anonymity of masks, but they’ve got murder in their hearts for those who get in the way of their kingdoms of this world.
Thanks for the article. I agree completely. It is what I like to call Eco-marxism. Basically just whatever these individuals think, based on their fallible polling models and where they think they see the wind blowing, that the crowds will believe, becomes their gospel for this age. It is a wholly cynical approach where demagogues entirely corrupt from the inside out, try their hand to crowdsurf their way into positions of influence. Anyone makes what seems like a "woke" comment? Add affirmation and 1up them in the process. Their game has fundamentally not changed. In that they do not mean nor believe a single word that they say. The best among them, the community organizers, make themselves believe it in the moment, perhaps. All the "true believers" they create, each their own frankensteins, are allured through various carnal appeals by these demagogues to believe in various future self-affirming utopias of their own making that nobody quite fully believes is real but their nihilism forces them to cling to the most illusory glory so as to avoid the inevitable self pity letdown that always follows such aspirations. The only winning move in this game is not to play, nor to even pay attention to such grotesque cut-out styrofoam creatures that this system has created. It is rather to see a higher truth that we are the created beings that need to be humbled into quiet obedience of a far more benevolent rule, a law of faith, where the burden is indeed light yet does anything but flatter, is true but does anything but reaffirm a man's fallible impulses. Actual fulfillment comes in accepting one's place under God– the only Lord God and our Lord Jesus Christ because we know it's true.
Anonymous,
So well put. Excellent. I appreciate your addition. Loved the metaphors. And I agree with what you wrote completely too. I do wonder who you are. I would protect your anonymity if you emailed me. I hope people read your comment. Thanks.
Everyone,
If I were going to add anything to the post, it would be that the woke people, just like the Pharisees are very often the biggest hypocrites, just like the Pharisees too. The Pharisees were hypocrites. These Woke people are too. They can afford their houses, their trips, their booze, their entertainment, their tattoos, their jewelry, their very expensive vegan diets perhaps, and then when they "give to the poor," they hardly sacrifice. Many don't even tithe to their church. Most of them put little time into actual evangelism and discipleship. It's all a very showy rush to the bottom, to look like they care. I know some of them, and they were not givers. They were not helpers. They were not people who really invested in eternity. Now they want to look good in front of their hip friends who write trite, superficial, self serving lyrics. It won't bring in a kingdom. It fakes a kingdom that is on greased skids toward destruction.
It's like the global warming people, almost just like them. If people really thought the world would end, the values of property on the coast would plummet and no one could get an assessment if it contradicted "science." Then the leaders fly around in planes in their mega mansions burning fuel and electricity. They wouldn't own cars if they were true believers. If the woke individuals believed in it, then why aren't these needy people living in their houses. They should support them full time. Most of it is phony.
They are insecure people deep down. They are eager to be thought highly of by the correct people in a particular bubble of meaninglessness. It tears down a society. It's an easy replacement for actual service, like tithing of mint and cummin.
I agree with anonymous above, that they don't really believe it, even in the highest positions. The ones who reach those positions are mainly shakedown artists.