Nearly every conservative writer and barking dog on TV has
noted the religious flavor of our revolutionary mood. Even liberal commentators
have used the term “Original Sin” to describe American slavery. A Puritanical
spirit has overtaken the land as the disciples of Wokeness embrace a secular
version of Calvinist Total Depravity. Grace, however mysteriously doled out by
John Calvin’s Predestinarian God, is limited in Wokeness to the randomness of
genes. Melanin is salvation. Traditional Christophobia has always argued against
the harshness and judgmentalism of Christianity. “Mean people, those
Christians. They hate the gays, you know.” The Christians’ retort is, “But
grace! For God so loved the world!” and
such. The great irony is that Christianity’s
replacement has no grace at all, no expiation of the cardinal, unforgiveable
sin of whiteness, only eternal guilt, perpetual subservience, restitution, and
reparation. When the total suffering of non-whites across all time and space
has been matched by the whites, only then may humanity live in peace and
equality.
Umm. No thank you.
Sinners in the hands
of an angry mob.
Christian sin and racism as defined by Wokeness have much in
common. You don’t have to murder to deserve hell “for all have sinned and fall
short of the glory of God.” As you are born into sin, so you are born (If white,
of course. Goes without saying.) into racism, the only sin that matters. The
Bible, despite its complexity, is often very black and white: saved and
unsaved, heaven and hell, the flesh and the spirit, etc. etc. Yet, one is
struck by the binary nature of Wokeness. It is not a component of the whole; It
is the whole. Robin DiAngelo, author
of the holy scripture “White Fragility,” stated, “Nice, white people who really
aren’t doing anything other than being nice people are racist. We are complicit
with that system. There is no neutral place.” The good are the sheep and the
Anti-racists who shepherd them. The rest are wolves.
Not a church service. Definitely not. (Click for video.)
In, “America,We Had a Good Run,” Omnipotentblog noted how the Western decline of traditional
religion is being channeled into all manner of pseudo-religious beliefs like astrology,
occultism, UFO’s, and even trolls. David French wrote of his Harvard friend,
who loved to mock the fairy tale of Christianity while bragging of her child’s
“Indigo Aura.” Some on the right, too, have replaced hymnals and homilies with
quasi-religious devotion to outlandish and gnostic conspiracy theories like
QAnon.
I came across this
book at a mental health symposium. Science!
In, “No,the Woke Won’t Debate You. Here’s Why.” Professor James Lindsay describes a
secular philosophy dripping in religious fundamentalism. A framework of
assumptions manifesting itself in safe spaces, trigger warnings, and
deplatforming, shields believers from heresy and doubt. The rejection of
discourse lies in the notion that arguments and facts themselves come from a
world completely saturated in white supremacy. In accepting a reasoned debate,
one accepts the racist scaffolding that frames it. Therefore, debate is
pointless; You would only be accepting rules stacked against you and your truth.
Experience is the final arbiter, the final conclusion. And if some
melanin-blessed person’s “truth” is that they are not a victim of white racism,
that they are free and have agency, well, what more proof do you need he is an
Uncle Tom? As one writer put it, the whole thing is a Kafka Trap: The more one
objects, the greater the evidence of his guilt. Among other things, a Smithsonian
curriculum on race listed “Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness” as:
·
Objective, rational thinking.
·
Cause and effect relationships.
·
Quantitative emphasis.
·
Delayed gratification.
·
Hard Work.
·
Politeness.
·
Time.
You see, belief is truth, and math is racist. (Don’t tell
the Indians and the Arabs.)
But why is all this madness happening NOW, for crying out
loud? One reason may be that we are finally seeing the ripened fruits of a
generation of indoctrination, triggered by the trauma of forced Covid isolation.
Another is the personal isolation and ghettoization of information wrought by
technology. And some say literally all of this is because of abject hatred for
Trump-Hitler. Another explanation is a phenomenon widely described but little
understood: the loss of confidence by elites in their own values. In Charles
Murray’s excellent book “Coming Apart,” he describes the nature of white
poverty. He focused on whites to remove race from the discussion. He showed,
convincingly, IMHO, that the roots of poverty exist wholly apart from racism.
Elites practice bourgeois values. They get as much education as they can, get
married before having children, work hard, and save. Divorce rates are low.
This group instinctively travels the road to success and then stunningly turns
around to scorn such values as racist and patronizing. The solution to poverty,
according to Murray, is simply for the elites to preach what they practice.
Shelby Steele, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and
a black man, explains, “There is a great deal of shame in what America did to
black people. Whites acknowledge that…It has compromised their moral authority,
weakened their power in American life. There is in the white part of American
society…a need to recover moral authority. So often, white institutions will
take our problems on, not because they want to fix those problems, but because
it restores moral authority and power. I call that white guilt power.”
After 9/11, I asked an Orthodox Jewish friend of mine how he
explained the intense hatred many Muslims felt for Jews. “It’s a spiritual
problem.” And a spiritual problem requires a spiritual solution, he said. The
Bible says man is inherently sinful, and the more one knows about people, the
more it becomes obvious the human psyche is a machine built for self-justification.
Yet, the Bible says that nature itself is a witness to His majesty. Despite
vast levels of comfort and abundance in Western society, if St. Augustine is
correct, no amount of pleasure and security will fill the God-shaped vacuum in
the human heart. Successful or not, faithless or not, we cannot escape the
constant murmur of sin in our souls. White guilt may be peculiarly
modern. Guilt itself is timeless.
I must make another point, which may seem disconnected, but
is not. Many commentators have observed that the whole liberal cause is an
“unrequited desire for community.” Sociologist Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone”
documented the dissolution of society’s civic culture and social capital as far
back as 1950. The British government recently set aside millions of pounds to
study and solve the problem of loneliness. Republican Senator Ben Sasse, wrote
an extremely well-received book called “Them: Why We Hate Each Other—And How to
Heal.” His conclusion is that the fractiousness and division in our country is
because of loneliness. This yearning for community cannot be bifurcated from
the deep, existential need for meaning. Volumes of research say the actively
religious are happier. The Apostle Paul says to not neglect meeting with one
another. We need meaning and community and often we get the one from the other.
Going to church? Two birds. One stone.
The violent riots near my home elicited deep sadness in me.
There is great anger in this country. If the diagnosis is correct, the decline
of faith and the rise of loneliness and isolation have caused a conflagration
of pain. One great truth of life is that the only things inevitable are death
and taxes. But the great truth of human nature is that Man needs Man and Man
needs God.
Revive us again, oh Lord.
