Recently I received a note from a supporter asking me to define “Woke” and explain why “Wokeness” is spreading so rapidly. Here goes:
As a culture-war term of art, “Woke” is roughly equivalent to “Progressive” but connotes an extreme form most comparable to religious fanaticism. A “Woke” person is a passionate fully committed convert to the Progressive “religion” of Cultural Marxism, but one especially zealous for the cause of imposing its doctrines on the world. “Woke” is therefore the Satanic equivalent of “Born Again,” and “Wokeness” is the demonic equivalent of evangelical fervor. Thus the current battle for America should properly be viewed as a religious war of conquest by Woke armies against Judeo-Christian norms and cultural infrastructure. And the new “cancel culture” norms they strive to establish are their version of Inquisitor-enforced anti-blasphemy laws, minus (for now) the torture dungeons. Conservatives need to wake up to the fact that secular tactics cannot defeat spiritual enemies.
The greatest flaw of “conservatism” is its reactive emphasis on “conserving” the secular status quo, while the greatest advantage of “progressivism” is its constant pro-active pursuit of an essentially religious vision for the future. Progressives always have that vision to strive for, a systematic agenda to get them there, and doctrinal “narratives” about the vision and agenda to motivate, define, and morally justify themselves by. The Conservatives’ primary goal and agenda is to stop the progressives from achieving their goals by dragging their feet and throwing up roadblocks to lefty “progress.” Thus the Conservatives always win at first because it’s easier to obstruct than to build, but the Progressives always prevail over time because persistence always pays off – and because (since the early to mid 20th Century) Progressives control public education and the media which they use to indoctrinate the Conservatives’ children with Progressive theology while they wait for enough grey heads to die off to permanently tip the balance in their favor.
Generation by generation, issue by issue, ratchet-like, they engineer social change ever leftward and everybody on the right follows a few steps behind: fighting “gay marriage” tooth and nail under Reagan, then mindlessly inviting “gay” couples to their anti-Trans events under Trump. What changed except our supposed principles? And what makes us think we can beat them this time using the exact same playbook – which they wrote?
The best of the American Conservatives (a minority of mostly strong Christians) have the goal of restoring the models created for us by our Christian founders: the biblical vision of a “Shining City on a Hill” and the Bible-based aspirational goals of the Declaration of Independence which they attempted (largely successfully) to codify in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. But most of the rest of the Conservative “movement” are just traditionalists who resist change by nature without any particular knowledge of the reasoning, philosophy or theology behind their traditions. The closest they get to a common defining ideology is “patriotism.” They have lost their Christian faith – or perhaps more accurately have lost faith in the power of Christian faith.
Sometimes these Populist, Libertarian and nominally-Christian types get reawakened to foundational truths when the Progressives move too fast and cause the frog to jump out of the pot. That happened first in the Baby Boomer generation under Jimmy Carter, triggering the Ronald Reagan presidency and the “Reagan Revolution,” and then in the Millennial Generation under Barack Obama which triggered the Tea Party Revolution, the Donald Trump presidency and the MAGA movement. In both cases it was visionary pro-active Christianity that empowered Conservatism to (briefly) reclaim some ground.
Unfortunately, through simple incrementalism in their “long march through the institutions” over the past century, the Progressives have taken enough of the seats of power, and destroyed enough of America’s constitutional infrastructure, that they may now be invincible. Their combined sense of excitement and impunity from that realization has spawned today’s hyper-aggressive Cult of Wokeness. The 2020 election coup, the plandemic, and now the “trans-demic” all illustrate a level of power and control among the now “Woke” Progressive elite so enormous that they now openly defy laws, ethics and social conventions with virtually zero accountability.
The double standards they operate by in every public sphere are so blatant and egregious that they transcend what many believe is just a delusional lack of self-awareness of their own hypocrisy. No, they are knowingly and sadistically toying with us – like Disney doubling and tripling down on their grooming agenda targeting our children and grandchildren while sneering at us with smug superiority as we try unsuccessfully to bring them to heel with boycott-based financial punishment. We’re plunging down the mountain in a speeding car, furiously pumping brakes that just don’t work and realizing that they really don’t care about the old money system anymore – “Woke” religious zealotry has supplanted even the profit-motive.
The Woke Progressives don’t care about the Boomers anymore. Our numbers are dropping every day. They don’t care about anti-Trans activism by the Millennials who will cave faster than the Boomers did because they already embrace much the rest of the LGBT agenda and thus have no moral authority or sense of history. Woke Progressives have got pretty close to 100% control of the schools, media, corporations, sports leagues, and NGOs so there is really nothing we can do stop them from transitioning ALL the children who are not being specially shielded and counter-trained by their parents. Florida and a few other states are laudably trying to keep Wokeness out of the schools but that’s not enough to protect kids from a trillion-dollar multi-institutional culture-wide campaign of Woke evangelism in the age of social media.
Importantly, because the Cultural Marxist strategy behind the Progressive agenda has always pushed the sexual revolution to disintegrate true marriage and the natural family (the immune system of every nation), recruiting the kids into sexual anarchy clears the path for everything else. That’s why it has such a high priority on the left.
All the above is just practical reality from a materialist perspective. Biblically speaking, I believe we have reached the point in the prophetic timeline described in 2 Thessalonians 2:9-12: “The coming of the lawless one will be accompanied by the working of Satan, with every kind of power, sign, and false wonder, and with every wicked deception directed against those who are perishing, because they refused the love of the truth that would have saved them. For this reason God will send them a powerful delusion so that they believe the lie, in order that judgment may come upon all who have disbelieved the truth and delighted in wickedness.”
Wokeness IS that “powerful delusion” (or at least a major aspect of it) and nothing can save the children from it but the truth of Christ. Rise UP, Oh men of God and proclaim that truth!
