Wokeness: A Christian Heresy

How the West’s memory of the Holy Victim, Original Sin, and Penance gave us wokeness

The most widely accepted explanation of wokeness is that it is a form of cultural Marxism – that Marx’s oppressed proletariat has been replaced with non-whites, that Marx’s superstructure has been replaced with white supremacy, heteronormativity and patriarchy, and that the “workers of the world, unite” slogan has been replaced with intersectionality. While this is true, it omits a crucial detail: Marx himself is best understood as a Christian heretic. His morality, which sought to give workers liberty and justice, was not materialist or scientific, but Christian – a truly materialist mind would have wanted to keep alive only the most intellectually and physically superior humans, or the most hedonistic, or no humans at all. Why would a materialist care about any human being if human beings are merely slightly evolved chimpanzees? The stated, and indeed, sometimes noble, objectives of Marxism and socialism are incomprehensible outside of a Christian moral framework. Only Christianity would push for equality between people, including between the strong and the weak, and the victors and the vanquished. Once Marxism and communism are properly understood as Christian heresies, the heretical Christian nature of cultural Marxism, or wokeness, becomes obvious.

Holy Victims

The centre of Christianity is Christ, described in the Mass as a Pure Victim, a Holy Victim, a Spotless Victim. It is the duty of Christians to see Christ in every man, woman or child, and to treat each person as they would wish to have treated Christ during His own time on earth, and therefore to glorify the victim rather than abuse him. It is worth emphasising how unique this is. In Hinduism, the downtrodden Dalits, known as Untouchables, are seen as deserving their misery for their actions in a past life. No holy victims there. Similarly, the notion of a holy victim who deserves adoration and who inspires us to care for other victims and treat them as holy, or at least, as worthy, is not what underpins Roman or Greek morality. I would imagine that, outside of offering human sacrifices, the concept of holy victims living amongst us would also have been alien to an Aztec or a Viking.

In the background of all Christian societies is a sense that the oppressed should be elevated and celebrated, for they shall inherit the earth. Therefore, it is perfectly rational for a society that carries Christian cultural baggage but is no longer actively Christian to seek new holy victims, if only out of force of habit. It is natural that it is only in the Christian West that one can expect apologies for colonialism. In the Middle East, where the Muslims successfully colonised Iraq, Egypt, North Africa, Persia and Turkey, the notion of apologising for Islamic colonialism is laughable – doing so would undermine the entire history of the Mohammadan faith. China will never apologise for colonising Tibet, Xinjiang or Mongolia – unless it becomes Christian. To this day, the Mongols remain proud of Genghis Khan. It is only a Christian society that can be shamed for not being sufficiently magnanimous when victorious over its enemies. The fundamental claim of the woke is that Europeans failed to consistently treat Africans, native Americans, and other vanquished peoples as though they did see Christ in them. This expectation of dealing fairly with defeated populations is not consistent with the Athenians’ “the weak suffer what they must,” or with the Romans salting the earth of Carthage to prevent it from ever rising again. It is thoroughly Christian. By tapping into this Christian sentiment, Western societies have manufactured new groups of holy victims, and granted them special privileges through affirmative action and racial quotas. A non-Christian society would have looked at defeated peoples as subjects to be kept down – as, for example, Gulf Arab states look at their own cohorts of foreign labourers – not as people they should elevate.

Heretics holding rituals on British streets

Original Sin

The woke faithful need to transpose Christian concepts upon their societies. This is most evident in the discourse over “whiteness.” Whiteness, in mainstream academic and media discourse, is associated with white supremacy, white privilege, white tears, white victimhood, white violence and other racist tropes. Why do whites tolerate such tropes? Why would any European man accept having his country be called racist, when he knows full well that it is far less racist than China or India or anywhere else in Asia or in Africa? The reaction of a Chinaman, an Arab or an Indian, when confronted with allegations that he is unduly privileged, exploitative, violent, hypocritical and dangerous would be, rather naturally, hostility and resentment towards his accusers. And yet we see white liberals falling all over themselves to bend the knee for BLM, to confess their “white guilt,” and to admit to being all what they are accused of and worse. Why is there such a lack of survival instinct? Again, the answer is not brute stupidity – the most liberal people are those who have passed multiple college examinations, gone to elite universities and attained a modicum of professional success. The answer is that in a Christian society that sorely misses Christ, a faint sense of Original Sin still survives. Original Sin is a wonderful truth. It forces us to look inwards, to examine our conscience, to remove the beam in our own eye before we look at the speck in our neighbour’s eye, to accept that the line between good and evil is in the heart of every man. This philosophy, this truth, is necessary for building a peaceful, cooperative, high-trust society. But without Christian joy, without Christian love, without Christian celebration to balance this sense of Original Sin, its fumes turn into vicious, wanton self-loathing. This is precisely what we see today among the woke.

Whites doing penance for racism

For the woke, Western colonialism, racism and slave trading are elevated above all other historical eras because doing so provides new holy victims that fill the Christ-shaped hole in the woke psyche, while satisfying their psychological need for Original Sin. A woke person is incapable of accepting that slavery and colonialism predate the European age of empire, or that they are simply reflections of human nature. The woke are not interested in the fact that slavery was the norm in all societies. The woke absolve black slave raiders who targeted nearby African communities and sold them onto white merchants. The woke are not interested in Islamic slavery, which predated Christian slavery and outlasted it, and which was more barbaric in its castration of boys to supply eunuchs. The woke are not interested in how the European colonisation of North Africa stopped Muslim pirates from conducting slaving raids against European ships and European shores. The woke are not interested in the fact that ending slavery globally was a uniquely European enterprise, which happened even though Europeans could have benefited from slavery even more greatly than they did. Why the woke’s lack of interest? Not because they do not know the facts, and not because they are unintelligent. The woke choose not to process these facts due to their religious need to attribute to their society a form of Original Sin. Indeed, it is this need for Original Sin that makes Western societies susceptible to woke propaganda that demonises it. Western societies remain Christian, and long for Christian morality.

Eschatology

No religion is complete without eschatology and penance. In the Christian faith, the Revelation to Saint John in the book of the Apocalypse is always true of our times, calling on us to repent, do penance and keep the faith, lest we be separated from the righteous when the end times come. Climate change plays a similar role in the woke faith. It is a call for penance – a call to live frugally and to consume less– so that we may avert being destroyed in the end times – in the coming climate catastrophe – and enter with the righteous into the golden age of justice – by completing the Green Revolution. The mindset of Western wokes precludes thinking about climate change practically – as a phenomenon that we must adapt to while trying to maintain Western living standards. Rather, their mindset is punitive, wanting to make the West cripple its own industries, destroy its energy sector and impose a poorer life of its citizens. The religious nature of climate change activism also shows itself in how the woke do not limit themselves to observable facts and winnable arguments, such as the importance of preserving ancient forests, preventing the extinction of rare species, reducing the level of pollution in our air and water, and adapting to the possibility of a change in climate rather than reducing Western living standards. Instead, climate activists choose to emphasise their certainty about the need for penance today to escape mother nature’s wrath in tomorrow’s climate catastrophe. Therefore, the woke environmentalist slogan is the punitive call to “just stop oil,” not the practical “make carbon capture work” or the constructive “build nuclear power.”

"Repent, Judgement is at hand."

This religious mindset of climate activists, which drives young environmental activists to sincerely believe that human life as we know it will end due to the West’s consumption of hydrocarbons, stops them from processing any other relevant facts. Take the fact that China is increasing its coal consumption to an extent that makes Western emissions cuts irrelevant, or that industrialisation and advancement for the developing world – whose population massively outnumbers that of the West – requires consuming far more energy, or that de-industrialisation in the West destroys the Western working class, or that Western carbon emissions have already been dropping drastically. The woke cannot tolerate any discussion of these issues. Even drawing attention to hypocrisy, like Al Gore’s and Barack Obama’s multi-million dollar beach front properties, or the number of private jets attending climate summits, gets you nowhere. Making these arguments and expecting them to win the day ignores the eschatological role of climate change in the woke religion. Due to the original Western sin of racism, Westerners should do a special form of penance that involves the destruction of their living standards; failing to do so will bring about the apocalypse. Conversely, since non Westerners are holy victims in woke theology, they are guaranteed their place in the coming utopia after the end times, and so they do not need to make penance in the same way. Thus, Chinese coal plants are forgiven and forgotten.

The soul

If one looks at the essence of the trans movement, one finds the following claim: there is something beneath the physical that determines the true identity of the individual. That the movement is highly sexual, materialistic and inconsistent is unimportant when compared with this essential claim. The claims that the trans movement makes are not material claims, rather they are spiritual claims. Consider the myriad gender identities such as Maverique, Intergender, Graygender, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, Aporagender, Queer and others. Look these identities up. They all boil down to the claim “I am unique, and my identity is not entirely represented by my physical state.” That claim, regardless of the gender identity cult and the bizarre sexual fetishes of the trans movement, and regardless of the great evils it inflicts on women and children, is obviously and undeniably true. It mirrors the original religious voice that says that Man is more than just another animal, that he is endowed with a special dignity that entitles him to freedom, even when material conditions are adverse. That said, it is a testament to the tragedy of our current state that youngsters choose to make that uncontroversial Christian claim under the umbrella of the Satanic transgender movement, and to use that claim to attempt to escape from the inescapable material reality of their bodies.

Discourse on the unimportance of physical appearance and the superiority of the soul.

Excommunication

For what do you get cancelled? Not for hanging around with Jeffery Epstein while he raped young girls, as Bill Gates, Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew did. Not for destroying the global economy as the titans of finance did in 2008. Not for leading America and Britain into the disaster that was the Iraq war, lying about weapons of mass destruction, and unleashing Sunni and Shia extremism upon the Middle East. Not for offshoring most industrial activity and turning your working class to paupers. No, none of these things gets you cancelled. However, if you say that trans women are mentally unwell men, or that there is no way to reduce energy consumption without reducing living standards, or that European colonialism involved more organised violence but less mindless brutality and far more charity than any other conquests, then you would get cancelled. Cancellation, or excommunication, is not punishment for ordinary sin. It is punishment for blasphemy and heresy, for deviating from woke dogma. This is entirely consistent with wokeness being itself a form of Christian heresy. Christians do not excommunicate ordinary sinners but call on them to repent. Christians excommunicate apostates, heretics and blasphemers, however. Therefore, the cheerleaders of the Iraq War or of offshoring industrial capacity can escape accountability if they adopt woke positions and affirm correct dogmas. Conversely, if a black man or woman adopts conservative positions, the woke will describe him or her as a coconut – black on the outside, but white on the inside. He or she is no longer a member of the tribe of holy victims, but a heretic damned to hell who has abandoned the dogma. And so, he or she gets cancelled. Furthermore, the path to readmission into the fold is the same: it is to affirm that you have sinned, that is, to confess, and to do penance, by donating to the appropriate charity and showing the necessary humility. As you might do if you were a Catholic.

A Christian answer

The great Catholic thinker GK Chesterton said that “every heresy is a truth taught out of proportion” and that “heresy is a truth that hides all other truths.” These are perfect descriptions of wokeness and the way it takes certain truths to mad extremes at the expense of other truths. European colonisers did not consistently see Christ in the peoples they vanquished, but they did so more than any other conquerors. Without European colonists, much of the world would still live in premodern times, without education systems, healthcare, indoor plumbing, modern transportation, power or much else. And by abolishing slavery from most of the world for the first time in history, Europeans have more than atoned for their sins. The woke are correct that we should be concerned about nature and about climate change, but our concern for the wellbeing of humans, our own societies and our working classes should be even greater. Climate policy should not be allowed to ruin the West’s industry and scrap its infrastructure. And yes, there is more to us humans than the flesh and what meets the eye, but our flesh is important and is a crucial part of our reality. Men cannot become women, and the human body should be used for its proper functions, rather than be mutilated by Mengele-type medical professionals. And while maintaining social cohesion, on which the existence of human rights depends, should require us to police certain kinds of speech, this policing should not be left in the hands of people who cannot tell apart man from woman, who do not understand human nature, and who have no concern for their own people. Rather, it should rely on a conception of the common good that has survived the test of time.

Because wokeness is so out of balance, its solutions – open borders, energy starvation, collective guilt, medical mutilation and self-loathing – are worse than the problems it claims to confront. Defeating wokeness is important, as it is doing grave damage to Western societies. Despite their flaws, these societies are still a bright light unto the world. The silver lining in the social acceptance of wokeness is that that acceptance reflects a malformed longing for a more Christian world. It is evident that wokeness is built on a Christian framework, and its success means that Christianity can dispel its influence. Western societies are subconsciously craving a world that is more in accordance with their heritage and their inherited faith. A more ordered, more Christian world in which the working class is respected, not looked down upon, in which human well-being is placed before profits and before hollow slogans, in which the rich understand their duties towards the poor, in which man sees Christ in his fellow man, in which man assumes his proper responsibility for nature, and in which society is intolerant of attacks against the Faith that built Western civilisation. This is a world of celebration and joy as well as recognition of Original Sin, of fraternity rather than collective guilt, of building on Christian Western achievements rather than demonising the lapsed Christian West.